Sam’s Club is opening a retail technology testing ground

Sam’s Club shoppers in Grapevine, Texas, can forget about long checkout lines and awkward small talk. This month, the Walmart-owned retailer is opening a new, tech-forward location without cashiers it hopes will serve as a testing ground for new ideas.

How it works: No cashiers = more space = more room for showcasing products and prepping customers’ online orders for curbside pickup and home delivery, according to executives.

• Shoppers scan items with Sam’s Club’s Scan & Go app, then simply exit the store. The app handles payment.

Testing, testing

This new Dallas-area location will serve to inform Sam’s Club on whether it makes sense to more widely roll out new technology and features – or send them back to the lab for an overhaul.

The method is a tried and true one for the retailer. Since Walmart founder Sam Walton opened the first Sam’s Club in 1983, the membership-based club has become the more tech-savvy arm of its retail-behemoth parent. The club has spun out several key innovations that its parent company now uses, too, such as Scan & Go, CNBC reports.

This emphasis on innovation has led to Sam’s Club increasingly attracting a young and tech-savvy customer base.

• 1 in 3 members already use Scan & Go when shopping in clubs. And about half of new members that joined during the most recent quarter were millennials or Gen Z, according to the company.

🧠 It’s alllll part of the plan: Sam’s Club is betting its technology- and- experience-focused approach will help it catch up to the undisputed king of warehouse clubs: Costco, which currently generates ~$90 billion more in annual net sales ($176 billion vs. $86 billion in the latest fiscal year).