REI – “good place to work with caveats”

Pros

Great community of people who love the outdoors. Great gear. Very good benefits. Great discounts. Good management. Financially sound company.

Cons

Too much emphasis and focus on employees selling memberships. Your pay and sometimes your hours are based on how many memberships you sell. If you do everything else well but don't sell memberships you won't get a good review and won't get a very big pay raise. If you sell lots of memberships but do everything else at a merely satisfactory level, you will probably get as good if not a better review and therefore your pay raise will follow accordingly. Another issue is the absurd visual standards that REI employs. There is an absolute fortune of time and money spent on meticulous visual standards of how product should be presented on the sales floor. The standards change often for seasonal reasons but also just to try something different and it literally goes to the point of absurdity in terms of how often things change. Yet you walk into an REI store and everything looks like a hurricane swept through and there are tons of empty pegs because employees are supposed to sell memberships, not stock and organize products so it's kind of a weird, unbalanced phenomenon. Also, smaller stores don't get all of the cool, higher end products even if there are hardcore climbers and skiers in the store's area; it's all based on the size of the store. That's kind of a dumb way to distribute product. Finally, as cool as some of the software programs are that REI uses (at least to someone who has never worked retail), they are very outdated and inefficient and REI literally wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (mostly on payroll) because of these inefficient programs.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize employees who do everything well except for selling memberships and don't cut into their hours or their pay raises. Allow smaller stores to have good, high-end gear if it is warranted by the local demographic. Continually update and streamline logistics and software programs. Pay retail employees more. Stay true to the cooperative's roots and don't get too big. Climb a mountain.