Sam’s Club just opened its first new location in 7 years. It doesn’t have any checkout lanes.

• Sam’s Club, owned by Walmart, opened its first new store since 2017.
• The location features the company’s latest tech — and notably doesn’t have any checkout lanes.
• CEO Chris Nicholas described the location as a model for a big expansion planned through 2030.

After 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: It had last opened a new location in 2017, and it abruptly closed 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 locations by 2030.

Now the location, which reopened on Thursday, gets to be the first in a wave of high-tech stores that aim to tap into a digital shopping experience.

Notably, this location eschews checkout lanes. Shoppers ring up their orders on an app and roll their carts through an AI-powered gateway to confirm their purchases.

Instead of conveyer belts and cash registers, the front of the store features patio furniture and a Mercedes-Benz SUV tagged with QR codes that shoppers can scan to purchase online for delivery.

CEO Chris Nicholas told Business Insider this location was a test bed for a lower-friction approach to the club-store format — a strategy to be reflected in new stores and remodels.

“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.”

Before becoming Sam’s Club’s CEO, Nicholas was the chief operating officer for Walmart US. He was instrumental in that division’s store-modernization strategy unveiled last year.

Pieces of the Sam’s Club strategy have been rolling out in recent years, including the scan-and-go app functionality, the computer-vision cart checks, and floor scrubbers that monitor inventory and update in-stock information. There are also pizza-preparing robots.

Those technologies come together in Grapevine. The intended result is the convenience increasingly common in smaller-format retail settings combined with the low-markup pricing that typically can be found only when buying in bulk.

Several shoppers told Business Insider that 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 on Thursday morning for the store’s opening.

Sam’s Club said the individual pieces of technology had been working well. Now it’s time to see how they all play together.

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