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When a tornado struck the Dallas area in December 2022, injuring five people and destroying the Sam's Club in Grapevine, the plan was to permanently close the location.
The Walmart-owned warehouse club had experienced a period of pullback in its store portfolio, having last opened a new location in 2017 and abruptly closing 63 stores in 2018.
The store count remained flat as the company increased net sales by nearly 50% to $86.2 billion last year.
The fate of the Grapevine store changed after Sam's Club announced last year that it planned to open 30 new locations by 2030.
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Now, the location gets to be the first in a wave of new high-tech stores that aim to tap into an increasingly digital shopping experience.
Most notably, this location eschews checkout lanes in favor of shoppers ringing up their orders on a mobile app and rolling their carts through an AI-powered gateway to confirm their purchases.
Instead of conveyer belts and cash registers, the front end of the store features patio furniture and a Mercedes-Benz SUV, tagged with QR codes that shoppers can scan to purchase online for delivery.
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CEO Chris Nicholas told Business Insider this location is a test-bed for a new lower-friction approach to the club store format — a strategy that will be reflected in new stores and remodels going forward.
"This, here, represents what the future looks like for Sam's Club," he said. "Our plan is that you will see a lot of the facets of what's in this club, in not just new clubs, but over time across our fleet."
Prior to his current role, Nicholas was chief operating officer for Walmart US, where he was instrumental in the division's store modernization strategy unveiled last year.
Bits and pieces of the Sam's Club strategy have been rolling out in recent years, from the scan-and-go app functionality to the computer vision cart checks to floor scrubbers that monitor inventory and update in-stock information. There are also pizza-preparing robots.
But nowhere else do those technologies come together quite like they do in Grapevine. The intended result is the convenience increasingly common in smaller-format retail settings combined with the low-markup pricing that typically can only be found when buying in bulk.
Several shoppers told Business Insider they had been using the scan-and-go tech for a while at other locations, and that it performed smoothly for the grand opening. Any hiccups they noticed were attributed to the unusually high volume of customers shopping Thursday morning for the store's opening.
Sam's Club said the individual pieces of technology have been working well. Now it's time to see how they all play together.
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