Just tell him that you were not planning on doing a cichlid tank so you need to take them back. He'll give you some crap answer about how they will live fine with everything and then just say, no thanks. Ask him if you can exchange them for some more barbs. Barbs do better in bigger numbers anyways and they are good cycling fish if you decide to not do the fishless cycling.

I'm not really all that big of a fan of the barbs to be honest... any other suggestions you could make that would go well with the barbs?

I really like the colors of the chichlids, but I'm basically broke now from buying all this tank stuff and can't afford to be changing around all the substrate and stuff like that for a little while. On top of that, I only have a 29 gallon tank and online it says most of these need a 50 gallon.

In terms of what goes with tiger barbs, the main thing is to keep at least 6-8 of them. That way they will focus their aggression on themselves and not other species (they are more aggressive than general community fish, but not to the point that you can't keep them with others). If you keep them in a school this large, they usually will do fine with the standard community tank fish although you do need to watch out for fish with long flowy tails as tiger barbs are notorious fin nippers.

10 would be pushing it. You generally want to overstock Africans, but not too much. Most mbunas get to be 5-6" when full grown. In a 29 gallon tank, you could probably have 40" of cichlids in there so you are probably looking at more like 8. The problem with a small tank is that you HAVE to get the male:female ratio right (1 male:3-4 females). If you put two males in that size tank, the dominant one will kill the other one. If you do decide to do it, I would recommend two mild-mannered (relative to mbunas) species with each having 1 male and 3 females. I would also add osme more rock because it will be vital that they can hide and escape each other.

ok guys, update:

took the barbs out, replaced with three different chichlids:

pundamilia nyererei - ruti island
OB chichlid
and a white top afra chichlid

Went to a different breeder, he really really knows his stuff. So much that he kept talking and talking for an hour and a half and I couldn't get out of the shop lol. But I guess it's going to be an all chichlid tank, regardless, the PH in the water up here is unussually high anyways. Therefore, this will work out.