When customers walk into the newly opened Sam’s Club in the Dallas suburb of Grapevine, Texas, they might notice that traditional checkout counters and self-checkout kiosks are nowhere to be found.
Instead, all customers must use the Walmart-owned club retailer’s Scan & Go tool to buy items.
“[The store is a] statement of where we want to go in the future,” Sam’s Club President and CEO Chris Nicholas said during a session at Groceryshop earlier this month.
The store, which opened last week at 1701 W. State Highway 114, is located near another innovative format in the Dallas area: Sam’s Club Now, a checkout-free technology store and “tech hub,” which is reportedly about one-fourth the size of one of the retailer’s traditional clubs. That location, which opened in 2018, has served as a testing ground for technology such as the now-chainwide ability for members to buy alcohol using the Scan & Go app.
While Sam’s Club Now is smaller, the approximately 150,000-square-foot Grapevine store is slightly larger than a typical Sam’s Club location. It’s the latest step in Sam’s Club’s almost decade-long effort to trial new solutions and merchandising tactics to better appeal to customers and streamline operations. And it comes at a time when Sam’s Club is seeing “rapid adoption” of its checkout-free technology, Nicholas said in an Omni Talk interview.
Checking out without traditional checkouts
Workers stationed at the store’s entrance and exit will be able to help consumers figure out how to use the technology, Nicholas told Omni Talk. For members who need assistance, store associates with mobile point-of-sale systems can help with the checkout process, according to a Sam’s Club spokesperson.
There are three automated, receipt-verification “exit trusses” instead of the standard two at other Sam’s Club locations to help people more quickly leave the store, the spokesperson said.
Digitally-engaged members — people who use Scan & Go, the computer vision-enabled receipt-verification exits and shop online — spend three times as much and are more loyal, which leads to higher renewal rates, Nicholas said during the conference session. Chainwide, about 30% of Sam’s Club’s customers use Scan & Go regularly when visiting the company’s stores and half of its customers are digitally engaged.
“What we find is that it doesn't matter what generation you're from — whether it’s Gen Z all the way through to the Greatest Generation — or what income level you are, or whatever your background is. Once you allow yourself to be connected to that digital ecosystem, you just never go backwards,” Nicholas said during the Groceryshop session.
Ramping up omnichannel shopping
Along with the app-based scan-and-pay technology, the store is also allowing Sam’s Club to respond to and prepare for more e-commerce transactions and omnichannel shopping behaviors. Sam’s Club shoppers are increasingly interested in stopping in to pick up a few items rather than primarily buying large quantities of goods, Nicholas said during the Groceryshop session.
The store has about 6,000 square feet dedicated to online order fulfillment — about four times the typical space earmarked for picking and packing pickup and delivery orders.
“We expect online pickup and delivery to be huge there,” Nicholas told Omni Talk.
There’s even a new omni-fulfillment carousel that stores items being prepared for fulfillment orders. Other e-commerce features include the use of refrigerated totes for online orders and high-speed doors in the fulfillment area for faster picking.
On the labor front, the store has added a dedicated manager and two team lead positions for fulfillment.
Outside, shoppers can find 32 dedicated parking spots — more than double the typical 14-16 at most clubs — for curbside pickup.
In the space where the checkout registers would normally appear, the store will instead have “inspiration spaces” with interactive displays where customers can view online-order items, Nicholas said. Shoppers can then scan a QR code to buy these digital-only products, which include a holiday tree and a Mercedes SUV, in the app.
The store is also testing a new system that delivers food orders to an assigned cubby after customers place a Scan & Go order, a company spokesperson confirmed. In the cafe section, customers can find cubbies for quick order pickup.
Other innovations
At the cafe, there’s a pizza robot that can make as many as 100 pizzas in one hour, the spokesperson said.
Sam’s Club is benefitting from Walmart’s ongoing investments in supply chain technology, allowing the club retailer to quickly scale digital systems without the typical implementation costs, Nicholas said during the Groceryshop session.
The club’s tech deployments streamline workers’ jobs and give them more time to interact with customers, Nicholas told Omni Talk. For example, The computer vision-enabled floor scrubber takes 23.5 million images a day and helps improve inventory management for workers, Nicholas said.
The Sam’s Club spokesperson said that although there will be no change to the number of store workers at the Grapevine location, some will have new roles.
Not all of the store’s new features center on technology. Upon entering, customers are greeted on their right-hand side by a large mural painted by a local artist.
Another attraction is a large sushi island located in the fresh department. The sushi island is part of this club’s “experiential merchandising layout,” which also includes gourmet cheeses, a floral section, “a quality assortment of wine” and a fresh tortilla machine in the bakery department, the company said.
The store also features the company’s biggest cake case to make restocking easier for associates.
Nicholas told Omni Talk that Sam’s Club’s embrace of innovation stems partly from the club retailer’s reputation for being “the tip of the spear on innovation within Walmart.”
“If you’re grounded in solving people’s problems and you’re listening to them, it gives you a lot of confidence for making changes,” Nicholas told Omni Talk. “The second thing is, it’s OK to just fail as long as you’re learning.”
