Sam's Club, a membership-style warehouse retailer owned by Walmart, expects to open the doors of its first all-digital, full-size store in the Dallas area just a few months after it announced plans to close its innovation technology office in downtown Dallas.
A tech-focused Sam's Club at 1701 W. State Highway 114 in Grapevine, Texas, will reopen by mid-October. The store will serve as a testing ground for the retail club with about 69 million members to try out new technology before rolling it out to other clubs. The Grapevine club will not have any checkout lanes or cash registers. Instead, customers can use a smartphone app that the retailer calls "Scan & Go" to check out in the aisles.
The Grapevine club will have a larger area — four times the size of a typical store — to fulfill e-commerce orders for curbside pickup and home delivery, and will display online-only items.
Sam's Club's Grapevine store is reopening after being closed for nearly two years because of property damage from a tornado. The company spent at least $15 million renovating the more than 150,000-square-foot store that it owns, according to a state work permit.
A technology and product team will be based out of the Grapevine store, a Sam's Club spokesperson told CoStar News. The company declined to disclose the number of technology and product employees working at the Grapevine location that is about 22 miles northwest of downtown Dallas.
Earlier this year, Walmart said it was closing its Sam's Club Innovation Center in downtown Dallas that had been open since 2018 and asking more than 1,200 employees assigned to the office to relocate to other U.S. locations. The closure was part of Walmart's broader plans to require remote workers to report to one of the retail giant's primary offices, including its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and regional offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Hoboken, New Jersey.
Innovation hub
Still, Dallas remains an innovation hub for the company, with the revamped Grapevine location and Sam's Club Now store that opened in 2018 along Greenville Avenue to serve as a small-format initial testing ground for new tech.
"Dallas continues to be an innovation hub for us with the Now Club and Grapevine club," the spokesperson said to CoStar News in an email. "We will have a technology and product team that will be based out of the Grapevine club."
The Grapevine store will allow Sam's Club to test the technology it has been piloting at the 32,000-square-foot Now store in a full-size store, the Sam's Club spokesperson added.
Innovations that have spun out of Sam's Club Now include Scan & Go, ship from club, autonomous inventory management floor scrubbers that keep track of products and an early version of exit technology that uses artificial intelligence or computer vision, the Sam's Club spokesperson told CoStar News.
"Many of the digital innovations you see in clubs today, such as our autonomous inventory management scrubbers, were piloted in the Now Club," the spokesperson told CoStar News. "Grapevine is the implementation of innovation at scale. Grapevine will serve as an innovation center to test new initiatives, and we will apply these learnings at current and future clubs."
Sam's Club has no plans to expand its Now store concept, with Dallas being the sole location, the company said.
The more than 40-year-old membership club with 600 locations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico is in expansion mode with plans to open 30 new stores in the next five years, CoStar News previously reported.