When you talk about coops, there is a distinction between a consumer coop and a worker coop. A consumer coop is generally where consumers band together to get better prices on consuming some product or group of products. A worker coop is where workers have ownership and make business decisions together. There are actually other coops too - e.g. farming coops are generally capital equipment sharing arrangements - think sharing ownership of the processing center for some crop. (Also ESOP worker coops - but I would say they generally are very weak on workers making significant decisions).
The REI workers are basically employees of a retail company that happens to be a coop. The coop part is for shopper/consumer members of people who buy things at REI.
i see thanks for explaining. i wish they were a bit more clear about that upfront. i had assumed the workers received some of the dividends as well, given their personal investment in the firm.
REI is routinely rated one of the best places to work. When I was there, we had both a pension plan and a 401k with match. Part time employees got PTO and (really good) insurance. They have mandatory paid sabbaticals on top of PTO. But as an employee you get no dividend, as the dividend is based on purchases, and the discounts available were far greater than the 10% back. Still, I wish I had stayed and moved into a technical role as I have never been treated as well as an employee as when I was there.
According to their Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REI), REI is a "consumers' co-operative". This is a different thing than a "workers' cooperative". My understanding is that most grocery co-ops are organized as consumers co-ops, or something close to it.
The grocery co-op near me has occasionally faced the prospect of the formation of an employee/worker union. I imagine that unionization is a thing that doesn't happen (or get seriously discussed) in a workers' co-op.
I find this distinction vaguely fascinating, but (apparently) not enough for me to actually get informed about it.