REI reviews

Most employees are part-time (10-15 hours per week) which is great if you aren't actually trying to pay any bills. Very few people work anything close to full-time. It's basically a dead-end job. Management positions are supposedly awesome, but the reality of working your way up the ladder is slim to none. Management positions get eliminated, and the people in management positions never leave. Turnover is high among sales specialists. Well, it is retail after all, but there is a lot of frustration at the bottom. Everyone is trying hard to impress the managers because they all want to be a candidate for a management position themselves whenever one becomes a available. At my store, there was a lot of two-faced back stabbing going on. It was kind of like high school all over again but with less acne and at least you could hide in the sleeping bags for a while. Selling memberships seems to be the only metric for measuring success, and trying to sell them is painful to say the least. Most customers already have a membership. The people who don't, generally don't want one. I could up sell anything, but memberships weren't good for me. If you do want to work your way up, be sure to perfect your membership sales pitch and get ready for irritated shoppers... especially when you are the third or fourth sales specialist to say the "M" word. Good luck.

Too much of a focus on membership. At my store, we have a lot of customers that come in just to by a quick snack or other small purchase. Though it's possible sell a membership to these customers, the majority of these customers came in ready to spend $2 not $22. The company is centralizing control way too much. Recently, shop labor prices for all stores have been set by the office in Seatle. The adjustments made are making it harder to sell memberships and are pricing us out of the market. I can't speak for all stores when it comes to management, but at my store the management spends way too much time in the office. Since the only full time staff in the store are managers and they spend the majority of the day in the office, the sales floor is left understaffed almost all of the time. It's not clear whether the workload of the managers requires them to be in the office so long or it's because they are lazy. The employees in my store really don't trust the managers to lead, the leadership is coming from the strong employees, who aren't appropriately rewarded for that contribution.