Sam's Club is mounting tablets on its in-store demo carts, turning the humble free-sample station into a data-collecting advertising platform, the latest move in the Walmart-owned warehouse chain's campaign to close ground on rival Costco.
The Bentonville, Arkansas, based retailer is weaving together decades of membership purchase data, in-store feedback tools, and off-platform ad targeting in a system it now calls the Retail Experience Network. For the roughly 600 clubs scattered across the United States and Puerto Rico, the bet is straightforward: if Sam's Club knows what you buy, it can sell that knowledge to brands willing to pay for a direct line to your cart.
Whether shoppers welcome the upgrade, or find it unsettling, is another question entirely. And it is one the company seems content to answer later.
Progressive Grocer reported that Sam's Club is pushing the tablet onto demo carts where members already stop for free samples. After trying a product, a shopper can scan a membership card on the screen, rate the item, and leave feedback. That feedback then posts to the product's page, a change some shoppers are already finding unsettling.
The scan does more than log a review. Because every purchase at Sam's Club is linked to a membership account, the retailer operates what it describes as a closed-loop measurement system. Buy a bag of chips after scanning the tablet, and the system ties that transaction back to the ad impression. Walk out without buying, and the system knows that too.
Harvey Ma, vice president and general manager of Sam's Club's Member Access Platform, the ad division now rebranded as MAP, framed the arrangement as a win for everyone involved.
"Our role is to leverage more than 40 years of first-party deterministic membership data to create programs that deliver clear business outcomes for our advertisers, while also ensuring those experiences are engaging and valuable for our members."
Forty years of shopping data is a deep well. And Sam's Club is not shy about drawing from it.
The tablet is only one piece. Sam's Club has also rolled out a MAP Influencer Program and extended its advertising reach through Meta, allowing brands to target Sam's Club members on Facebook and Instagram. If you bought dog food at Sam's Club last month, a pet-brand ad could follow you onto your phone the next morning.
The retailer is also tapping Circana, a data firm that aggregates information from more than 500 million loyalty cards, to help advertisers estimate how their Sam's Club campaigns perform outside the warehouse chain's own walls. The tool, called MAP Rest of Market Analysis, lets brands gauge whether a Sam's Club ad moved the needle at other stores too.
Walmart's broader retail empire has been busy with consumer-facing changes of its own, including a recent overhaul of its Great Value packaging aimed at shedding the store-brand stigma. The Sam's Club ad push shares the same corporate DNA: use the data advantages of massive scale to squeeze more revenue from every square foot.
GhostBed, a mattress company, tested what Sam's Club calls Expert Review Videos and reported a fourfold sales lift when those videos ran alongside MAP media placements. That kind of number gets advertisers' attention, and it helps explain why Sam's Club is building out the platform so aggressively.
Sam's Club ranked eighth on Progressive Grocer's 2024 list of top food and consumables retailers in North America. Walmart U.S. claimed the top spot. Costco, the perennial warehouse-club leader, remains the chain Sam's Club is most eager to challenge.
The ad-tech expansion is a deliberate effort to sharpen that competitive edge. Costco has historically been more restrained in its advertising posture, leaning on low prices and a famously loyal membership base. Sam's Club appears to be betting that data-driven personalization, and the ad revenue it generates, can close the gap from a different direction.
The company signaled it has no plans to slow down. A Sam's Club statement described the trajectory in forward-looking terms:
"Looking ahead, we're building toward more intelligent, agent-driven systems that reduce friction, increase speed and translate insights into action, delivering stronger outcomes for advertisers and better experiences for members."
"Agent-driven systems" is corporate language for artificial intelligence making real-time decisions about what ads you see, when you see them, and how much a brand pays to put them in front of you. For a membership warehouse where people go to buy bulk paper towels and rotisserie chickens, that is a significant shift in ambition.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have studied how consumers react to advertising that feels too precisely aimed. Wayne Hoyer, a marketing professor and co-author of the research, described the dynamic in blunt terms.
"When consumers are exposed to these ads, they make an assessment of ambiguity, such as, 'What is this?' and whether this is intrusive surveillance, such as, 'Are they watching me?'"
Hoyer did not mince words about the consequences.
"If the answer is yes, this creates a negative emotion that can negatively affect purchase intentions."
His bottom line was even more direct.
"Consumers do not like to be watched. This is perceived as an invasion of privacy."
That finding sits awkwardly next to a system designed to track every scan, every sample, and every purchase tied to a membership card, then feed that information to advertisers and follow the shopper onto social media.
Earth.com reported on the University of Texas research, underscoring the tension between personalization and the creep factor that data-heavy advertising can trigger. The question is not whether Sam's Club can build the system. It plainly can. The question is whether ordinary shoppers, the ones paying annual membership fees for the privilege of buying in bulk, will accept a shopping experience that increasingly watches them back.
Sam's Club has not disclosed a specific rollout date for the demo-cart tablets, nor has it said how many of its roughly 600 locations will receive them. It is unclear whether the tablets are already appearing in stores or remain in a planning stage. The company has also not addressed whether members can opt out of the data-linked advertising features, a silence that, given Hoyer's research, may prove louder than any product review posted from a sample cart.
None of this is illegal. Membership agreements typically grant broad data-use permissions, and retailers across the industry are racing to build advertising networks on top of their transaction data. Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger all run versions of the same play.
But there is a difference between a loyalty card that quietly logs purchases and a tablet mounted on a cart that asks you to scan, rate, and engage, then pipes that behavior into an ad network stretching from the warehouse floor to your Instagram feed. The first feels like a discount program. The second feels like surveillance dressed up as customer service.
Free markets thrive on transparency. If Sam's Club wants to monetize its members' habits, the least it can do is tell them, plainly, in English, before they scan, exactly what they are trading for that free sample.
