In 2019, 25% of consumers said they planned to buy online, use curbside pickup, or choose delivery going forward. By 2021, that number was 54%. No one at Sam's Club needed convincing that this was significant. The question was what to do about a floor plan that wasn't built for it.

Alternate channel sales were growing at 25% CAGR. If the trend continued without structural intervention, projections showed that by FY2035, more than half of all Sam's Club sales would originate outside the physical store. The club infrastructure — its footprint, its fulfillment capacity, its merchant workflows — wasn't designed for that reality. And the people managing it were operating with a skillset shaped entirely by a world that was quietly becoming the past.

The challenge wasn't operational. Operational problems have operational solutions. This was something harder: the organization needed to imagine a future it couldn't yet see, and build real strategy around that imagination before the window closed.

Thinking fifteen years out

I was brought in as lead design strategist to partner with Sam's Club's merchandising and building operations teams on two parallel engagements: one focused on the future of the physical store format, and one on the future of the merchant role itself. Both required something that large organizations find genuinely difficult — setting aside what's true today long enough to think clearly about what will be true in fifteen years.

We used Futures Thinking methodology as the foundation: a structured practice of identifying signals and drivers of change to construct multiple plausible futures, rather than forecasting forward from current conditions. I facilitated sessions drawing from Merchandising, Operations, Product, Membership, Marketing, and Finance — deliberately cross-functional, deliberately diverse in perspective. The goal wasn't efficiency. It was friction in the right directions.

The signals the team surfaced ranged from the practical to the speculative: subscription retail growing more than 50% in a single year, ghost kitchen models operating out of existing commercial kitchens, mobile store concepts like Robomart that could be summoned by app, hyper-personalization engines beginning to reshape what "an assortment" even meant. Synthesized through a macro lens, four drivers emerged that would shape Sam's Club's future: MetaCommerce, The Curated Consumer, The Climate Effect, and MetaWork.

We gave the future member a name. Through generational research and values modeling with the Membership team, we built the "Happy Host" persona — a future Sam's Club member who shops fluidly across physical and digital channels, who makes decisions across multiple data points simultaneously, who cares about sustainability and personalization in equal measure. She doesn't think in channels. She thinks about what she needs, when she needs it, and which experience she trusts to deliver.

The insight that unlocked everything

The futures work generated a wide field of possibilities — curated marketplaces, phygital commerce, green membership programs, even 3D-printed food. But one structural insight surfaced that reframed the entire store strategy question.

The most valuable thing in a Sam's Club wasn't the products on the shelves. It was the floor itself.

And large sections of it were being consumed by categories that didn't require a physical experience at all. Paper towels don't need an aisle. Bottled water doesn't need to be browsed. OTC medications and laundry detergent — these are purchases members make by habit, not discovery. The digital penetration data confirmed what the logic suggested: members were already shopping these categories digitally in meaningful numbers. The floor space housing them wasn't serving members. It was serving inertia.

Shifting those low-interaction categories to digital-only shopping would free that real estate for two higher-value purposes: faster, more efficient fulfillment operations in the back of the club, and curated, experience-driven retail in the front — the kind of in-club environment that gives members a compelling reason to make the trip. Not because they have to. Because they want to.

That became the Omni-Member Merchandising Model: a hybrid club format splitting the footprint between a fulfillment zone and a curated member experience zone, supported by digital enablers — large digital aisle displays, app-integrated browsing, Scan & Go checkout — that make the transition to digital-only categories seamless rather than punitive.

The merchant they hadn't hired yet

The parallel engagement on the future merchant role surfaced something equally important. The organizational and skillset changes required to run this model didn't exist yet. The merchant of today was a "jack of all trades" — managing item selection, suppliers, pricing, flow, distribution, and online listings simultaneously. The merchant of the future, whom we called Tessa, would need to be something different: an item visionary. Data-fluent. Creator-networked. Thinking phygitally — not about what's in the club, but about how every product decision lives across physical and digital simultaneously.

We mapped the competency evolution in four dimensions — toolset, mindset, behavior, and skillset — and developed a transition roadmap showing how the organization could move merchants from where they were toward where they needed to be. Building the store model was half the work. Building the people to run it was the other half.

Both engagements concluded with co-authored strategy documents delivered to Sam's Club senior leadership: consumer research, competitive signal analysis, operational modeling, financial projections, and phased implementation roadmaps. The kind of work that sometimes lives in a presentation and is quietly forgotten. This one wasn't.