Sam's Club Scan & Go: The Checkout Revolution Driving Grocery's Next Digital Growth Wave

Sam’s Club is tearing up the old rulebook, literally ripping out every manned and self-checkout lane so it can double down on the way Americans already shop: on their phones. Mobile already drives just over half of U.S. e-commerce revenue, and about 187 million Americans tapped “buy” on a handset in 2024, spending roughly $564 billion. Momentum is stronger still in food: Grocery Doppio’s new 2025 Digital Grocery Outlook pegs digital-grocery sales to jump another 9.7 percent next year, nearly four times faster than total-store growth.

Against that backdrop, Sam’s roll-out of its all-app Scan & Go checkout, heading to all 600 clubs, turns every visit into a logged-in, personalized event designed to accelerate new sign-ups, deepen loyalty, and pump out first-party data.

What Makes a Shopper Valuable?

Grocery Doppio labels the high-value consumer the “omnichannel shopper.” They have the grocer’s app on their phone, belong to the loyalty program and interact digitally around six times a month. They’re only 19 percent of customers, yet they spend an average $1,043 a month and deliver 25.6 percent gross margin, far richer than store-only or online-only patrons.

Crucially, even when the final ring occurs in-store, about 70 percent of grocery baskets now involve at least one digital touch, price check, list-building, mobile coupon or payment. In other words, the shopper is already on the phone; retailers just need a compelling reason to keep them there all the way to the parking lot. Scan & Go supplies exactly that hook.

‍Scan & Go: Friction-free Checkout for a Phone-First Era

Traditional self-checkout forces shoppers to unload their basket at a kiosk, scan each UPC and pay on a fixed terminal. Scan & Go flips the flow: members scan items with the Sam’s app as they shop, settle in-app and stroll through an AI camera arch that confirms the e-receipt matches the cart in seconds.
Retailers see the upside of a frictionless checkout. In Incisiv’s latest self-checkout study, 79 percent say it lifts customer experience and 58 percent cite lower front-end labour costs but only a sliver monetize those lanes with personalized ads. The Scan & Go app closes that monetization gap by default.

Who Else is Leaning In?

Sam’s Club will phase out all staffed and self-checkout lanes and install AI-powered exit arches in its approximately 600 clubs by December 2025 . ALDI U.S. is expanding its 2024 ALDIgo Grabango pilot beyond Aurora, Illinois, to three stores total. Meanwhile, Meijer has made its Shop & Scan mobile-checkout system the default in around 220 stores and is piloting an AI exit arch in Royal Oak, Michigan.
‍

Why Sam's is Betting the Club on It?

Sam’s executives make a simple case: members who shop digitally are worth more. CFO Todd Sears says around 40 percent of transactions are already digital, a figure that includes Scan & Go and e-commerce orders and the Grapevine, TX prototype club now runs at 100 percent Scan & Go participation. These phone-first shoppers visit the club three times more often, buy from twice as many categories and renew their memberships 10 points higher than store-only peers.

Popularity trends are on Sam’s side: three in ten U.S. adults have used Scan-and-Go in the past six months, and adoption soars to nearly half of Gen Z. The revenue upsides are equally clear. Grocers stand before an $8.5 billion retail-media opportunity, and a phone-based checkout with 100 percent logged-in traffic is prime real estate for high-margin ads.

CEO Chris Nicholas put it bluntly to investors in April:
“We will redefine the future of the club channel, and that future is omni. We’ll measure success by membership growth and loyalty.”

The AI Dividend

Sam’s exit arch is more than a fancy gate; it’s an early example of store-level AI. In Grocery Doppio’s AI in Grocery report, 64 percent of chains cite customer-experience AI as their fastest-growing use-case and see a $2.5 billion value pool in service applications. Scan & Go turns every cart into a real-time computer-vision dataset and every phone into a personalised ad screen exactly the kind of “experience + efficiency” combo AI budgets are chasing.

Will it Drive Loyalty and Sales?

Early internal performance metrics put hard numbers behind the Scan & Go bet.

At clubs where the app is fully available, digitally engaged members shop three times more often, buy across twice as many merchandise categories, and renew their memberships at rates 10 percentage points higher than members who only shop the physical club. The feature itself scores a Net Promoter Score above 90, with about 75% of members opting in whenever it’s offered. Meanwhile, Sam’s new AI exit arches cut the average door-to-parking-lot time by 23% compared with manual receipt checks.

It’s a loyalty flywheel: faster trips → happier members → richer data → sharper offers → repeat.

Head-Winds to Watch

Shrink & Fraud: Computer-vision audits must genuinely beat kiosk error rates.

Digital Divide: Seniors or cash-preferring shoppers will need tablet-equipped associates at the exit.

Privacy Law: Illinois BIPA and California CPRA set strict rules for storing exit-arch imagery.

Network Resilience: A Wi-Fi or LTE outage still stalls the gate.

Bottom line

Scan & Go turns each Sam’s Club visit into a data-rich, phone-first event, exactly the behaviour Grocery Doppio says drives the highest spend and margin. Pull it off at full scale, and Sam’s proves that cashier-less, AI-assisted front-ends are no longer a technical curiosity but the next default for U.S. grocery giants chasing profitable digital growth.