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Walmart is about to open a new kind of Sam's Club in Grapevine that will be different from the rest: It'll be an all digital store, without checkout lanes.
According to a company representative, the new store will open on October 17, with fanfare and a full schedule of events listed below.
The store is actually a reopening of sorts, of a store at 1701 W. SH-114 that closed in 2022, when the roof was damaged by a tornado on December 13.
Company CEO Chris Nicholas is describing the store as a forward-thinking prototype that represents the company's efforts to evolve for the future.
Instead of getting orders rung up on a cash register, shoppers will be required to use a smartphone app called Scan & Go to ring up purchases as they walk through the aisles.
When leaving the store, shoppers will walk under "computer vision-based" archways that use AI to scan their carts, comparing their products to their digital receipts — technology the company introduced in the spring.
In the place where you'd expect to find cash registers will be a display of unusual, online-only items such as Christmas trees or a five-carat lab-grown diamond — items they would not be able to see and touch otherwise — as well as a larger area for e-commerce (curbside pickup and delivery).
More space-age features will include a pizza robot that can make up to 100 pizzas in an hour, and a new system that delivers food orders to an assigned cubby after customers order through Scan & Go.
Walmart is touting this as a first-of-its-kind store. However, in 2018, they opened a similar concept on Greenville Avenue in Dallas called Sam's Club Now, which then-CEO Jamie Iannone called "the epicenter of innovation for Sam's Club."
In that store, customers similarly use the app to scan items as they shop, but a staff member is still required to give the order a final onceover.
A spokesperson says that the Now Club served as a small-format initial testing ground and Grapevine allows them to test innovation at scale in a full-size club (the Grapevine store is 151,000 square feet). The Now Club remains open and will run in tandem with the Grapevine club.
Schedule of events is as follows:
Wednesday, October 16: Soft Opening
hursday, October 17: Grand Opening
Member's Mark demos, exclusive merchandise, exciting brand experiences and the first 3,000 members receive a Member's Mark swag bag.
October 16-20
