Came in off the highway to check out re/supply, found the room it was in and went in. Maybe 30 seconds later an employee walks in the other door:
Employee snaps at me: You're not allowed to be in here.
Me (confused): Uh, I'm just looking at resupply gear?
Employee: You have to leave now. There's a class here in 15 minutes. Sorry.
I walk out, they watch me leave then also leave the room. Lolwut? The sorry was an afterthought, but at least they seem to have realized they were being unreasonable.
I went to talk to another staff member about this, turns out the class was in nearly an hour. They thought it was perfectly fine and said something along the lines of "yeah, well, it can take a while to setup." So I guess that's just the norm for customer service at this location.
A few points:
1) If you're going to be pissed off at customers for going where customers are normally allowed to go, put up a sign or something letting them know something has changed?
2) I could have just kept looking at the racks of stuff in there while they went to do whatever it was doing before they noticed I was in there.
3) One of the many employees idly standing around could have escorted me to where they were presumably going to move the stuff out of there so I could still check it out if anyone actually cared.
Been a member for around 15 years and had a great experience buying four items at the Sandy store earlier in the day and geeking out with employees about gear... I'd skip this one. Worth noting Yelp is hiding more 1 star reviews, REI's generally don't have such a bipolar review skew as this store. read more