Sam's Club - History

History

The first Sam's Club opened on April 7, 1983 in Midwest City, Oklahoma in the United States.

In 1989, Sam's entered New Jersey with a store in Delran in a former Two Guys / Jefferson Ward store. This was Walmart's first foray into the Northeast. The first Walmart discount store in New Jersey opened in 1991 in Turnersville. The company entered the Pennsylvania market in 1990.

In 1993, Walmart acquired PACE Membership Warehouse from Kmart and converted many (but not all) PACE locations into Sam's Clubs.

The latest flagship store opening as of September 13, 2007 (2007 -09-13) was in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The largest Sam's Club store is located in Pineville, North Carolina with 185,000 sq ft (17,200 m2) of retail space that was formerly an Incredible Universe.

On September 24, 2006, Sam's Club received a new logo. The new logo has an updated serif font and features a green and blue diamond inside the big blue diamond, found above the word 'Sam's'.

Sam's Club's previous slogan was "We Are In Business For Small Business" until 2006; the decision to remove the slogan comes as Sam's Club attempts to remove itself from serving just small businesses and open up to more individual customers.

In December 2007. Sam's Club launched a new slogan, "Enjoy the Possibilities". Since then it became an official advertising slogan, mentioned in television and radio advertisements, but it is not mentioned on its website. As of January 2008, the "Enjoy the Possibilities" slogan was no longer in use. Sam's Club launched their latest slogan "Savings Made Simple" in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Starting in April 2007, there was speculation of a possible sale or spinoff of Sam's Club from parent company Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. At Walmart's 2007 annual shareholder's meeting in June, management said that Sam's Club is not for sale, although they did not say they are not considering a spinoff.

On February 26, 2009, Walmart Canada announced that it would close all six of its Canadian Sam's Club locations. This was part of Walmart Canada's decision to shift focus towards supercenter stores, but some industry observers suggested that the operation was struggling in competition with Costco and the non-membership The Real Canadian Superstore (known as Maxi & Cie in Quebec), that had a well-established history in the country. Sam's Club also rebranded the two as yet unopened locations as new Walmart Superstores.

In January 2010, it was announced that ten stores would be closed, including four in California. At the same time, Sam's will open six new stores at various locations in the United States.

On January 24, 2010, it was announced that approximately 11,200 Sam's Club employees would be laid off. The layoffs resulted from the decision to outsource product sampling duties to an outside company (Rogers, Arkansas-based Shopper Events, which already performs in-store product demonstrations for Walmart) and to eliminate New Business Membership Representative positions throughout the chain. Most of the laid-off employees were part-time and represented about 10% of the total Sam's Club workforce.

Rosalind Brewer was named as the new CEO for Sam's Club, a change that came into effect on February 1, 2012.