Vantaggi
REI seems to attract really great staff. Most of the people I work with are fun and hardworking. Health benefits are available to anyone, including part time staff. The customer base is, for the most part, good to work with.
Svantaggi
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.