A dose of reality! - Sales Associate REI Employee Review

It's just another corporate environment. It doesn't matter how much product you sell or how customers feel about you, the obsessive drive for memberships is the only thing they care about and managers are chosen on their ability to push the membership issue to the utmost. When you hire on you're told that the membership drive is important but what you are not told is that you work on commission...the joke is on you however because there is no extra benefit to selling memberships, the compensation is being allowed to work at all. Your livelihood is completely dependent on membership sales; the more memberships the more hours irregardless of how much product you sell. The problem is that many of the customers are already members but the worst part is the famous REI customer service becomes second to being a used car salesman pushing memberships. I've seen it over and over again where the top scorers go quickly from customer to customer seeking out those few customers who are not members or have other little scams for getting the most memberships. If you have the temerity to question this approach your reward for your effort is being assigned 4 hours a week instead of 25 hours as happened to one of the most accomplished sales associates at the store I work at....blatant payback. If you have never held a good job before or are experienced in the working world you will not be happy at REI and indeed may find feelings of contempt creeping into your thoughts about modern REI management policy, especially if you have been a co-op member for sometime. If this is your first job and you want to stay at REI my advice is forget customer service and concentrate on greeting people and asking if they are members just as quickly as you can during your shift and, I can't emphasize this enough, go as quickly as possible from customer to customer, that is by far the most important skill you will learn at REI.