Pros
Super cool coworkers and very chill managers on the ground (mostly) Most customers are extremely nice people and the conversations you have as an employee are genuinely rewarding. Company culture on the bottom rung of the ladder is extremely fun and there is a great deal of camaraderie and focus on togetherness between the employees. If only management and corporate lived up to that standard! I'm about to talk a lot of smack in the next part but it should be noted for the sake of fairness that this was my favorite job I ever had.
Cons
company "culture" is a laughable caricature of liberal semiotics. The company propagandizes endlessly about their positive treatment of employees and their commitment to conservation and time and time again chooses only to advance shareholder value. Common practices include illegal "restructuring," (firing unionized employees), setting comically low hours for employees, setting weekly hours as little as thirty minutes below the full-time threshhold so as not to have to pay benefits, and promoting managerial favorites over seasoned leaders. REI's health insurance is so bad that recipients have to pay into the state in order to meet the minimums. Employees get ridiculously few hours, and the store hires dozens more than they need to spread out the hours as thinly as possible, in an effort to trivialize the workforce as college students and hobbyists, preventing (they hoped) any real labor organization. The managers are nice people but largely incompetent. Possibility for promotion is more or less nonexistent and the company relies zealously on the cheap, transient labor of college students to supplant full-time employees who would require a real commitment from the company. Diversity is in the toilet, which is not necessarily the fault of management. Asset protection has management's balls in a vice so employees are constantly harassed to play policeman with "suspicious" customers, which leads to the implicit biases of the nearly all-white workforce being played out in real time. Since REI is so prohibitively expensive, the customer base is even whiter than the employees, and poor or dark-skinned customers are often treated badly. Black employees report feeling tokenized and not enough is done to ensure that women employees feel safe from their male co-workers. The corporate largesse of the company ensures that serious HR complaints are totally insolvent through sheer bureaucratic lassitude. Sexism, racism, and harassment are thereby effectively permissible, as each complaint practically has to be touched to eric artz's lips before more than a slap on the wrist can be authorized. Unionization efforts (which are being met with an often illegal and very telling union-busting campaign by corporate) hope to address some of this, but in non-union stores your rights as an employee are essentially nil.