Kelly T.

I give two stars because the staff is nice and friendly. I am here to write a review on the corporate overhead, regarding recent changes to the bike shop services.
On Monday, March 30th, 2021, I walked into rei, just as I have for years before, with my brother to get his ebike tuned up. We walked up, and they asked what we needed, so we told them his bike needed a basic bicycle tune up, and all of a sudden the 3 employees just gave me this grim stare, and told me "sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news, but we won't work on your bike." I asked them why, and they said it was a new "corporate overhead policy, which says that from now on the bike shop is reserved only for ebikes that were purchased directly from REI".
(Keep in mind, without power this is just a normal ordinary bike, nothing special. I didn't mention anything about the electrical system, as this needed no help.)
I asked if they would just give it a tune up on the bike parts that they could tune, and they still completely refused. I asked them to show me the policy change and their response was "I know it was recently, let me try to find it" and they proceeded to look on the computer for 10 minutes, unable to find any policy change documentation whatsoever. They showed me an older document, which very clearly stated that our bike fit the necessary requirements to be serviced at rei. Still they refused to help.

So later on, we decided to test something. We took off the wheels of the same bike and walked back in with just our wheels and ask them to service them, and sure enough they did it without question... for some reason they could service the wheels, but not the bike?
Oh and the best part, after they trued the wheels, as we were walking out, the employee at the front sending us off asked "I think you're missing the rest of your bike"... yeah how ironic that was.

I'm very disappointed and as a loyal rei co op member, I've grown to love the bike shop and come regularly for advice and parts. Unfortunately it looks like they're about to lose the first of I'm sure many loyal customers with this undocumented corporate overhead change of policy that doesn't make any sense. I will be patient for a little while as I have reached out to rei corporate to see if they can straighten this out, but otherwise, expect me to never go to rei for bike maintenance EVER again.