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The merchandise -- ranging from snail salad to rosy slabs of swordfish -- has never looked fresher. Yet sales at the $5-million-a-year business have dropped by about 30 percent since Jan. 19.

"It's the big scare," explained Shawn Spardello, who looked bored, rather than harried, on a pre-Super Bowl Saturday.

Once disaster docked at Moonstone Beach, people started hearing that seafood wasn't safe, he said, as a single customer peered into the lobster tank.

Spardello's boss, company president Ronald F. Galloway, is the one who's really steamed.

The dealer said that almost all the fish that he sells retail and wholesale to hospitals, hotels and restaurants is from out-of-state sources and overseas.

He buys very little fish from Galilee because there simply isn't enough there for him. Instead, he shops at fish markets in New Bedford, Chatham and Gloucester, Mass., as well as Portland, Maine. His lobsters come from Maine, Canada and Fairhaven, Mass.

"You try to go with alternate services so that people won't have questions" about the safety, he said.

The state Health Department has already inspected Galloway's and other dealers' lobsters and shellfish to make sure they are untainted.

Yet people haven't stopped calling to ask if his product is safe.

Galloway doesn't blame the customers, whom he called "uneducated" about such matters. Instead, he points the finger at the press.

"The media has blown (the oil spill) up so big that you have no recourse," he said. "People like to believe everything they hear."

Galloway's grandfather started the business 76 years ago, however, and this merchant isn't about to throw his hands in the air.

Galloway took out an ad in Friday's Journal-Bulletin, assuring customers that they can buy uncontaminated fish at area shops.

He said he thinks it will take another two or three days for the ad to "kick in."

Yes, there is a sign on the window of Galloway's shop that reads "Sorry. No quahogs."

But Galloway said that has nothing to do with the oil spill and everything to do with an overflow from the Fields Point sewage plant in Providence, which closed Narragansett Bay to shellfishing.

There are elaborate safeguards put in place by the state Health Department to ensure that fish and shellfish are safe, Galloway explained. The fish he sells comes with a "paper trail," he said.

Galloway keeps a record of where he buys his fish so that Health Department inspectors can trace a batch of fish from his shop to the wholesaler to where it was caught or harvested.

Take Galloway's bay scallops, for example. They could be from China or Peru. And the tiger shrimp he offers are probably from Thailand. Those shellfish as well as the 40,000 pounds of cod he sells each week can all be traced to their origins, he said.

Ernest M. Julian, chief of the Health Department's Division of Food Protection, confirmed Friday what Galloway has been saying all along.

Fish and shellfish sold in stores and restaurants is safe to eat, Julian said. Fishing in the polluted area was stopped and all food establishments selling fish from that region have been inspected.