The Co-op and the Distance Between Us

May 30, 2026

REI has grown into the largest specialty outdoor retailer in the United States; what remains of its "co-op" identity?

By Hannah Truby

Photos courtesy of the REI Union, via Instagram.

Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of summer and the beginning of the outdoor recreation season. It’s the time of year when outdoorsy people are most on the hunt for those pre-summer sales, and few names come to mind faster than Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI). For years, REI has been the place where everyone from gear heads to fair-weather backpackers go for equipment and expertise, and they often do so feeling that they’re making a fair ethical choice as a consumer.

But this year, shoppers were asked to make a different kind of ethical choice: to sit out the company’s biggest sale, in a boycott led by the workers who run it.

A little context:

Since 2022, workers at 11 REI stores across the country have voted to unionize over issues including pay, scheduling, and working conditions, with a 12th store in San Diego recently filing to join them.
After four years of contract negotiations, the two sides reached an impasse last month when management put forward what it called its “last, best, and final offer,” which the union rejected as “unacceptable.”
The union voted overwhelmingly—98.5 percent—to turn it down, saying the proposal would limit organizing at other stores and restrict workers from speaking publicly about the company—claims REI disputes. The National Labor Relations Board previously investigated REI and found evidence the company withheld wage increases and benefits packages from workers at unionized allegations REI has contested.
With negotiations stalled, the union voted to escalate: a coordinated boycott of REI’s ten-day anniversary sale.

The union has framed the boycott not as a break with the company, but as a pressure campaign aimed at shoppers who still see themselves reflected in the co-op model of roughly 70,000 pledged participants, whose participation they argue still carries a kind of democratic weight.

What makes the moment more than a contract fight is the longer history it sits inside. Unlike publicly traded retailers beholden to shareholders, REI has long framed itself as something different: a member-owned co-op rooted in community, stewardship, and the outdoors. Born from principles of shared ownership and equity, it has since grown into a national retailer carrying many of the same pressures as any large employer.

For its leadership, the boycott risks undermining ongoing negotiations. For its workers, it’s a way of testing whether “co-op” still carries any functional meaning beyond branding.

To better understand how the outdoors’ go-to ethical retailer found itself caught in such a web of its own morality, it’s helpful to trace a little of its history, beginning in the Pacific Northwest:

Northwest natives Lloyd and Mary Anderson were teenagers during the Seattle General Strike of 1919, when roughly 65,000 workers shut the city down for five days. At the time, labor unions held real weight in the Pacific Northwest, and in the decades around the Great Depression, cooperatives began to take hold as a parallel model for economic survival and mutual support.

So when the Andersons—avid mountain climbers—were looking for a more affordable way to buy quality ice axes, Lloyd came up with an idea: form a cooperative with a small group of friends to pool money and secure better prices on climbing gear, purchased directly from manufacturers in Austria. They recruited five friends, each contributing $1, to fund a first batch of imported equipment. At first, they ran the co-op out of their West Seattle home, before moving into a series of downtown Seattle locations. In 1963, it settled into a larger, rambling building on Capitol Hill, where it remained until 1996.

And thus, the REI Co-op was born.

The structure was simple: shared ownership, no traditional markup, and access rooted in use rather than advertising.

A co-op, or cooperative, is a business owned and democratically controlled by its members rather than outside shareholders—an identity REI still markets heavily, even as it now operates more than 190 stores nationwide, with eleven locations formally unionized and others in the process of organizing.

For much of its early history, that model shaped not just REI’s pricing, but also its culture. The company didn’t present itself as a brand selling outdoor identity.

REI staff, Seattle, 1965 Photo by David Chantler. Photo courtesy of Recreational Equipment Incorporated.

Recrerational Equipment Inc. catalog, 1963. Photo courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

1981 REI Summer catalogue. Photo courtesy of the Outdoor Recreation Archive, @ outdoorrecarchive.

I always liked spending time in an REI. It felt like a peek into a cool version of adulthood, organized around high tech gear and adventure. I remember visiting my stepdad when he worked there as a sales rep. The Brannan Street store in San Francisco had a fake rock outcropping in the shoe section—a display meant to mimic terrain—and I would usually pass the time while my mom talked with him by climbing on it, or wandering through the tent displays.

For many people, REI stores function as something a little more than retail. They’re entry points into outdoor life, designed for both the outdoorsy and the outdoorsy-wannabe. The mesh of accessibility and expertise makes the space cool enough to aspire to, but still welcoming enough to enter and ask questions.

It’s a distinct balance the company maintained through its early expansion.

In its first decade, the operation grew from a single shelf into a larger retail presence. Its first full-time employee, Jim Whittaker—the first American to summit Mount Everest—came on board, bringing early publicity that cemented its reputation as a place shaped by lived outdoor expertise rather than retail marketing. Whittaker became the chief executive in 1971, and expanded the co-op beyond Seattle, opening a second store in Berkeley in 1975.

Around the same time, tensions began to surface over REI’s direction, and whether it should grow into a broader outdoor retailer or stay closer to its roots in serious mountaineering gear.

The topic of specificity versus broad appeal—hyper-niche versus public access, gatekeeping versus openness—has long shaped debates about the outdoors. The split between John Muir’s preservationist ideal of untouched wilderness and Gifford Pinchot’s conservationist belief in managed use is one example. Both positions hold truth, but neither is complete; the balance shifts with context.

So when a company like REI expands into new markets, it does so under the banner of expanding access while also growing its customer base.

REI entered the ‘80s with roughly one million members and six stores, adding two to three locations each year. As its customer base expanded, it moved beyond its mountaineering roots into camping and cycling, acquired gear manufacturers to produce its own equipment, and launched REI Adventures in 1987, offering guided trips and outdoor education. In 1983, it dropped “Co-op” from its branding to reach a broader audience beyond its Seattle roots, becoming the largest consumer cooperative in the U.S. that same year.

The Seattle Times, November 26, 1967. Photo courtesy of The Seattle Times.

By the late 1990s, REI had arrived at a rare balance of expertise and accessibility/ breadth and specialization, particularly with the launch of REI.com (the largest outdoor gear and apparel store on the internet at the time).

With the new millennium, the company began focusing more deliberately on reaching younger audiences. After investing in urban youth outdoor programming, CEO Sally Jewell passed the torch to Jerry Stritzke in 2013, who further shaped REI’s appeal to a younger, more socially progressive customer base.

And good timing too, because this was the era when optimism became especially marketable/easy to package. Brands learned to speak in the language of inclusion, access, and shared values. And with the rise of social media, audiences—especially younger ones—became fluent in holding them to it in real time. In outdoor retail, this translated into a growing emphasis on equity alongside access—the framework many outdoor brands now operate within today.

2022 marked a shift. Amid a wave of labor wins in New York, REI’s SoHo flagship became the first unionized store, with eleven more following in the years after. The same day, REI relaunched its co-op membership program: raising the one-time fee from $20 to $30, restricting its used gear program to members, and replacing cash dividends with in-store credit on eligible purchases. After the vote, REI raised its minimum wage nationwide—except at SoHo—and brought Black Friday operations back after abandoning its #OptOutside campaign. As negotiations continued, the company stopped publishing its annual executive compensation report. Organizing pressure persisted despite allegations of anti-union tactics, with additional stores voting to unionize and workers staging walkouts over conditions at SoHo.

Inside the world of outdoor culture, REI has functioned as something more than your traditional retailer. For decades, it’s felt (intentionally) like an entry point into outdoor life—a place where beginners could ask basic questions without signaling inexperience, where knowledge was structured as access rather than gatekeeping, and where the boundary between consumer and participant felt unusually thin.

For me, that’s what makes the current conflict feel culturally significant. It’s not just a labor dispute, it’s a labor dispute over what kind of institution REI actually is, and what it means when a cooperative structure operates at the scale of a national retail chain.

As organizations grow, founding principles tend to compete with operational requirements. Over time, structure shapes culture more than intention does, and the gap between cooperative language and corporate-scale operations is showing.

For shoppers, the immediate question is more practical than structural. Memorial Day has passed, but if you're still looking to gear up for summer, you've got options. And of those options, try thinking local, won't you?

In Truckee and Tahoe, independently owned shops like Tahoe Mountain Sports, Tahoe Gear Exchange, and Pacos operate less like traditional retail outlets than hybrid spaces: part gear shop, part repair counter, part information exchange, part beer fridge, with a structure closer to a service economy than a brand ecosystem. Staff are local, often skiers, climbers, and guides themselves, and advice is shaped by local snowpack, trail conditions, and lived familiarity with the terrain rather than national product cycles. Buying secondhand is always a solid option, too—either online or at a local thrift or consignment shop, like Gear Hut, my favorite one here in Reno.

Now, as an adult (often still tagging along with my stepdad while he makes his store visits), these are the places I love to linger in.