Pros
The community at REI is awesome! I have never worked with such a great group of people. Everyone is incredibly kind, hard-working, and adventurous and the managers are incredibly approachable. The discounts are pretty great too.
Cons
A common issue I have seen is scheduling, I have seen and had myself man instances of being scheduled outside of my availability. Another issue I had was being constantly denied days off even after a new hiring period because they did not have enough employees in my department. The other big issue is the infamous membership sales. Although the membership is a great deal that 99% of customers would benefit from, most people just don't want to hear it. I have seen a lot of people get frustrated because they come in looking for advice or a specific item and all anyone wants to do is sell them a membership. Your hours, pay, and promotions are based off of your membership sales so you have to be really ok with annoying people to succeed in this. The other problem is training. I am very experienced and knowledgeable in most of the activities we supply and initially applied for a sales position but got hired as a cashier. I was hoping to eventually move to the hard goods sales or bike shop as the manager's made it sound like this was a possibility. If you get hired on as a cashier, you have almost no chance of ever getting to work in a different department.