逆势突围：山姆会员店如何在跨国零售巨头退潮时破解中国市场密码

When it comes to the rise and fall of multinational retail giants in the Chinese market, we've witnessed far too many poignant departures and contractions in recent years, yet against this backdrop of foreign supermarkets falling one after another,

Walmart's Sam's Club has charted a distinctly different upward trajectory.

This is not merely a story about a business model surviving, but a textbook case study in how to precisely decode Chinese consumer psychology and deeply implement localization strategies.

There was a time when foreign retailers could conquer the Chinese market simply by introducing mature overseas models, but today, this crude "copy and paste" approach has long since stopped working.

The reason Sam's Club has been able to gain a firm foothold in the Chinese market — even seeing "membership cards hard to come by" in some regions — is that it has truly cracked China's unique market code.

Let's start with one of the most representative details: the subtle changes in product packaging.

This might sound trivial, but it's precisely this meticulous attention to detail that reflects a retailer's deep insight into local lifestyles.

Take Member's Mark American-style steaks under Sam's private label — if sold entirely according to American standards, they would typically come in generous packages of over one kilogram.

For American families with large freezers who are accustomed to shopping once a week, this makes perfect sense.

However, Sam's operations team in China keenly recognized that such portions not only create pressure to consume for Chinese families but also pose a serious refrigerator storage challenge.

As a result, we see that steak packaging in Chinese stores has been precisely adjusted to between 450 and 800 grams.

Behind this change is solid data support.

According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the average Chinese household size dropped to 2.51 people in 2024.

The shrinking of family structures directly drives the fragmentation and refinement of consumption scenarios.

That "stockpile mentality" warehouse shopping experience must be adapted to fit the premium real estate of core Chinese cities and modern families' dietary habits of pursuing ingredient freshness.

Beyond packaging adjustments, product selection localization is an even more critical move in Sam's counter-trend breakthrough.

During the recently passed Lunar New Year, if you walked into any Sam's Club store, you'd find that the shelves no longer held only imported butter and cheese, but were filled with items brimming with rich Chinese New Year flavors — copper gourd ornaments,

premium ginseng gift boxes, and various traditional dried goods.

This "East-meets-West" product selection strategy has greatly eliminated the cultural gap between the foreign brand and Chinese consumers.

Even hot items like nut gift boxes frequently sell out immediately upon stocking during the pre-Spring Festival period, demonstrating just how precisely they've grasped the psychology of holiday consumption.

On this topic, Fu Yifu, a special researcher at Jiangsu Bank, has pointed out incisively that Sam's successful expansion in China is largely because it has successfully tapped into the growing demand for "quality consumption" among China's middle-class families.

This isn't just about buying things — it's a projection of identity and quality of life.

Although the macroeconomic environment faces challenges, the middle class's standards for food safety, product quality, and shopping experience haven't decreased — they've actually become even more discerning in some respects.

Sam's Club has built a moat through strict quality control and differentiated product selection, satisfying this demographic's psychological need to "buy with eyes closed."

At the same time, its powerful instant delivery service perfectly solves the pain point of warehouse shopping where items are "too bulky to carry," making stockpiling no longer a burden.

In terms of expansion strategy, Sam's has also demonstrated a rhythm and approach that is distinctly different from its competitors.

As Sam's long-time rival in the US, Costco didn't enter the Chinese market until 2019.

Costco adheres to a more cautious, even conservative strategy of "buying land and building from scratch."

While this model ensures long-term asset value, it also significantly limits the speed of store openings.

Currently, Costco has only seven stores in mainland China, highly concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta and Shenzhen, and has yet to enter the Beijing market.

In contrast, Sam's pace appears much more nimble and aggressive.

In 2025 alone, Sam's opened 10 new stores in mainland China, bringing its total nationwide store count to 63 by year's end.

This expansion speed in an era when brick-and-mortar retail is generally struggling is nothing short of miraculous.

It's worth noting that Sam's reach is rapidly extending from increasingly saturated first-tier cities into second and third-tier cities.

Late last year, Zhangjiagang and Yangzhou in Jiangsu Province welcomed new Sam's Club stores, marking the official acceleration of its "market penetration strategy."

The logic behind this is actually very clear: as competition intensifies in first-tier cities, economically developed second and third-tier cities like Zhangjiagang and Yangzhou have steadily growing resident incomes, and because housing price pressure is relatively lower,

consumers' disposable income and willingness to spend are actually even stronger.

Furthermore, with the emerging trends of "returning home to buy property" and "reverse migration for employment," these lower-tier markets are gathering large numbers of young people with experience living in first-tier cities, who have high acceptance of membership-based supermarkets and have become Sam's new growth engine.

Of course, this rapid expansion is not without concerns.

The rapid replication of any business model inevitably places enormous pressure on supply chain management and quality control.

Over the past year, reports about food safety issues at Sam's have occasionally appeared in the media, undoubtedly serving as a warning bell for the breakneck expansion pace.

The core competitiveness of a warehouse membership store lies in "strict selection" and "quality control" — once quality control is diluted due to overly rapid expansion, it will shake the brand's foundation.

On this front, Walmart China's senior leadership clearly has a sober understanding.

At Walmart's 2025 investor conference, Walmart China CEO Zhu Xiaojing explicitly stated that the company would increase its annual quality control budget by 35%.

This statement can be seen as Sam's effort to rebalance "quality" and "quantity" while pursuing speed.

From the financial data perspective, Walmart's transformation strategy in China is clearly working.

In the third-quarter earnings report ending October 31st, Walmart China's total sales grew nearly 22% year-over-year to $6.1 billion — a growth rate far exceeding the 10.8% average of its international business division.

Among these, Sam's Club achieved double-digit transaction volume growth, becoming the locomotive driving the entire Walmart China business.

This is a very interesting "two-sided" phenomenon: on one hand, Walmart's traditional hypermarket business is undergoing painful contraction and adjustment, with store count plummeting from 412 in 2020 to 283 in fiscal year 2025;

while on the other hand,

Sam's Club is thriving vigorously on the same soil.

This actually reflects the profound structural transformation taking place in China's retail market: the traditional "big and comprehensive" one-stop shopping model is being replaced by more personalized, quality-driven, and experiential niche formats.

In this fierce market battle, Sam's faces not only its old rival Costco but also a powerful siege from Chinese local retail forces.

Companies like Freshippo, Yonghui Superstores, and Pangdonglai — known for its exceptional service — are all actively exploring membership store models or high-quality retail paths suited to China's conditions.

The "Hong Kongers heading north" consumption trend that has emerged in recent years has also brought unexpected incremental traffic to warehouse stores in Shenzhen and other cities.

Costco's Shenzhen store has revealed that large numbers of Hong Kong residents make cross-border shopping trips on weekends, becoming a significant contributor to its sales.

This phenomenon also indirectly confirms the cross-regional attraction of quality retail resources against the backdrop of Greater Bay Area integration.

Looking back on Sam's nearly thirty-year journey in China — from the long hibernation after opening its first store in Shenzhen in 1996, to the accelerated pace after 2016, to the current full-scale explosion — this is itself an evolutionary history of multinational enterprise localization.

It tells us that in a market as rapidly changing and massive as China, there is no permanent business model.

Only those enterprises willing to get down to ground level, truly understand the changing needs behind the "earthy charm" of Chinese families, and willing to transform their product forms and service details accordingly, can have the last laugh in this fierce elimination race.

The future retail battlefield will no longer be a simple price war, but an all-around competition of supply chain efficiency, product selection acumen, and insight into consumers' lifestyles.

For Sam's Club, how to maintain food safety standards while sustaining high-speed expansion, and how to keep innovating amid the relentless pursuit of local competitors, will be the greatest test it faces in its next phase.