REI Co-op is laying off about 275 retail employees, roughly 2 percent of its in-store workforce, as the retailer updates its store operations system and labor structure.

REI announced the layoffs in a letter to employees dated October 12, titled “Stewarding The Future,” penned by REI’s VP of Stores Mary-Farrell Tarbox, attained by SGB Media.

In late January, REI announced it would cut 167 corporate jobs as it restructured its headquarters in Kent, WA. The cuts impacted 8 percent of the workers in its headquarters and 1 percent of the company’s workforce.

The layoffs come as REI is coming off a challenging year.

As reported by SGB Media, REI reported a loss in 2022, impacted by lower margins but said it made significant investments in its employees, community and other areas. Sales reached $3.85 billion in 2020, up 4.1 percent year-over-year. The co-op said it ended the year with a “strong liquidity and working capital position and continued to invest in its mission of investing in its members, employees and the outdoors.”

Tarbox’s letter to employees announcing the layoffs reads as follows.

Team –  

As we continue to work on building a best-in-class employee experience, we know we have an opportunity to create a more consistent employee experience across every store in our fleet. 

Our current operating model for stores is more than a decade old. While there are some things that we have done and continue to do extremely well, there are many areas that are out of date and no longer serving our employees or REI’s mission and business.  

You’ve also shared clear feedback through listening sessions, engagement survey comments and Co-op Compass Group feedback that you want more transparency and consistency in how you’re scheduled, more accountability in expectations for employees and management, and more clarity in roles and responsibilities.  

We heard you. Taking into account both business needs and employee feedback, we are making three significant changes today that will begin to roll out immediately: 

Increased Scheduling Transparency and Hours Predictability 

  • As a retailer, we are constantly balancing the need to be responsive to business demand and seasonal trends with offering employees the transparent and predictable schedules you’ve told us you want.  
  • We are not balancing these needs as well as we can today. Our current scheduling approach is outdated and offers neither the flexibility we need to drive the business nor the support and predictability you’ve told us you need. 
  • Starting now and throughout the next year, we will be updating this model to ensure the majority of store employees have transparent and consistent hour predictions with committed weekly ranges.
  • Going forward, every employee will fall into one of three job status categories: 

o    Full-time: employees who can expect to work at least 32 hours per week. 

o    Part-time+ (new): employees who can expect to work 16-24 hours per week. 

o    Part-time: employees who can expect a high degree of flexibility and variability throughout the year to meet both the employee desire for flexibility and support our dynamic business demands. 

  • This new model will enable us to better support the needs of all store employees with predictability and standardization while still meeting business demand. Your manager will reach out to you in the coming weeks to have a conversation about all of these changes. 

Updated Store Roles and Job Descriptions

  • Today our job descriptions are outdated and inconsistently applied. A sales manager in California may have very different duties from a sales manager in Ohio. As a result, store employees across the co-op are held to inconsistent performance standards and with unclear pathways for growth. 
  • We’ve reviewed every job description in the Stores organization, and updated a number of job descriptions, titles and expectations to ensure that titles match the work performed. Senior Retail Sales Managers (SRSMs) will become Assistant Store Managers (ASMs) and Retail Sales Managers (RSMs) will become Department Managers (DMs). 
  • The two biggest changes are the elimination of the Lead role and the addition of new Senior Specialist and Senior Shop Mechanic roles. 

o    Lead: As we reviewed roles and job descriptions, we discovered that Lead is the most inconsistently used role across the fleet and are retiring it effective immediately, with most employees currently in a Lead title moving into new roles in the organization. 

o    Senior Specialist: this new role will support the store management team in driving sales, delivering exceptional service and maintaining operational efficiency. At the direction of the store management team, they will train and act as role models to store employees and assist Department Managers with department strategy and operations. 

o    Senior Shop Mechanics: this new role will take direction from Shop Service Manager to implement shop strategy and operations. They will specialize in shop team training as well as daily coordination of shop production and throughput.  

  • These updated roles and areas of responsibility allow us to create new processes to make work easier for managers and employees, help teams prioritize work against our measures of success and allow managers to spend less time on routine administrative tasks—freeing them up to focus on engaging employees and delivering an exceptional customer experience in store.  

New Store Leadership and Staffing Models 

  • Today we have no consistent model for store structure with outdated volume bands and a different staffing model in nearly every store. This lack of clarity leaves us with inconsistent accountability measures for store leaders and teams and no standard operating procedures across stores. 
  • We looked at the work that our teams do every day and are making two significant structural updates to better support that work. 

o    Volume bands and staffing guidelines: We designed 11 new store volume bands that better reflect individual store total workload based on store demand, SIF, returns and Shop volume. Volume bands will dictate staffing levels for employees and leaders, ensuring that we have the right number and mix of roles to handle the scale and complexity of the work each store drives.  

o    Management structures and areas of responsibility: We’re creating consistent management structures with clear guidelines for the numbers of Assistant Store Managers, Department Managers (formerly RSMs) and Senior Specialists (formerly Leads) in each store as well as areas of responsibility for each management role.  

  • This updated management structure and clear and transparent criteria for staffing and leadership roles will ensure that leaders and employees are held accountable to consistent expectations, scheduling, hiring and development practices—no matter which store they work in.  

Some of these changes are significant updates from where we are today, and there will be people impacts as a result. Of our approximately 12,300 store employees, today we are saying goodbye to approximately 275 people from the eliminated Lead role. We’re reinvesting many of those hours back into other roles in the store, and between new roles we are adding and upcoming holiday hiring, we will have opened approximately 1,300 new jobs across all stores throughout Q4. We are starting to post new roles on rei.jobs now, and will continue to add more over the coming weeks. 

This is not something we take lightly—these actions are necessary to set us up for long-term success. We cannot build a best-in-class employee experience while we currently have more than 180 different employee experiences. These changes will give us the flexibility needed to support our business, provide enhanced hours predictability for most staff, improve accountability at all levels, ensure we’re investing the right number of hours into the right roles.

We know that there is always more to do to continue to improve your experience as an employee of the co-op. We’re grateful to everyone who’s raised their voice through an employee survey, a Culture Committee, the Compass Group or through reaching out directly to share their thoughts about where we can and should be doing better. We’re excited and committed to continuing to do this work together.

Best,
Mary-Farrell Tarbox

Photo courtesy REI