Pros
- If you're an outdoorsy person, you already know REI's your toy store. The employee discount was 10%-50%, so it was pretty easy to get whatever you wanted. - For retail, the training was significant. Vendors came in often and gave talks, and there was plenty of hands-on time. A minor downside is having to go all the way out to the store on a day off to attend a training. - There's a variety of things to do each day in the store, so it's pretty tough to get bored.
Cons
- Useless, utterly insulting store-level management. Apart from the day-to-day complete lack of leadership, there was all manner of corporate double-speak and bureacracies. The real kicker came when a co-worker was accused of stealing. Apparently management had, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put a hidden camera in the stock room(!) to combat huge shrink numbers. They used the footage to fire said co-worker for theft when they saw him "moving things around" in back. Needless to say, "moving things around" was part of the job, and the whole thing just came off as paranoid and nuts. I left soon after that. I heard later the manager got REI's version of 'employee of the year' a few months later. - The pay is pretty terrible. Granted, I haven't worked there in a couple years, but I really doubt it's magically jumped up to the living-wage range. Benefits are available to part-time employees after a certain amount of time, but the health coverage was negligible and I don't think it even included dental. - I had open availability, but had to pick up shifts my co-workers dumped because I only got scheduled for 25 hours a week. Somehow, people with other jobs/kids/school were still scheduled the same hours week after week when they dropped shifts. - Not much room for upward mobility. There are a couple supervisors per store, a store manager and his/her asssitant. If you want decent hours and pay, you'll have to shoot for one of those spots, which will probably involve a transfer.