Sam's Club, every mention
28 scenes · ← back to Sam's Club
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 17Ben Gilbert 11
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Sam's Club comes up
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:05:54 Ben Gilbert Sam's Club.
- ▶ 1:12:41 David Rosenthal Once this plays out, and of course Sam's Club is also becoming a juggernaut at this point in time, Price Club is doing fine.
- ▶ 1:12:51 David Rosenthal Again, capital is not the competitive vector here, but they're not being as aggressive, they're not expanding as fast as Costco and Sam's Club.
- ▶ 1:13:44 David Rosenthal So, Price Club was certainly doing fine, it wasn't declining, but Jim and Jeff at Costco, and certainly Sam at Walmart and Sam's Club, they are pedal to the metal, aggressively expanding, and that's not really Saul and Robert's MO.
- ▶ 1:16:36 David Rosenthal Sam's Club and Walmart was aggressively expanding at this point in time.
- ▶ 1:16:41 David Rosenthal And so if they had waited too much longer, Sam's Club would have just gotten huge and potentially run away with the market.
- ▶ 1:16:48 David Rosenthal So after the merger happens, even the newly combined price Costco is still only a hair bigger than Sam's Club in terms of number of stores and revenue.
- ▶ 1:16:59 David Rosenthal So they kind of needed to do it pretty quickly or Sam's was going to run away with it.
- ▶ 1:17:05 Ben Gilbert Which is so funny because it's a much less disciplined business.
- ▶ 1:17:09 Ben Gilbert Every bit of DNA in Costco and Price Club is just so unbelievably disciplined and an admirable way to run a business, and Sam's Club strikes me as a bunch of cowboys who are changing strategies all the time.
- ▶ 1:17:24 David Rosenthal Well, you know, it's a second business line under Walmart, of which the main Walmart Supercenter business line is one of, if not the greatest retail business of all time.
- ▶ 2:16:31 Ben Gilbert I guess there's some, I'm not gonna go join BJ's Wholesale Club or Sam's Club when I already have a membership.
- ▶ 2:41:28 Ben Gilbert Quote, the average Sam's Club only generates about half the revenues of a Costco, and that gap has widened over time.
- ▶ 2:41:36 Ben Gilbert Given the unit economics of the business, that's a tough hurdle to overcome, which explains why Sam's Club has a smaller unit base today than it did a decade ago.
- ▶ 2:42:02 David Rosenthal Like, I think Walmart has basically decided, look, we're not gonna kill the Sam's Club business, but this is not where we're focusing our competitive energies right now.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 3:25:34 Ben Gilbert And Jim famously has said that some of his highest performing Costco's are across the parking lot from Sam's Clubs.
- ▶ 3:39:20 David Rosenthal We talked at the end of the Walmart episode about how Walmart is currently closing down Sam's clubs and turning them into online walmart.com fulfillment centers.
Walmart · Acquired
- ▶ 2:18:41 David Rosenthal The other piece of the business that we haven't talked about at all, but is a interesting, both piece of Walmart's business and competitive vector to Walmart is Sam's Clubs, which were started in 1983, I believe, and
- ▶ 2:19:11 David Rosenthal Costco has been this amazing story that is like the Walmart of Walmarts, you know, and Walmart has it too with Sam's Club, but it's interesting you bring up margins.
- ▶ 2:19:30 Ben Gilbert Sam's Club does about seventy five billion.
- ▶ 2:19:55 David Rosenthal But Walmart really was kind of positioned to have best of both worlds here of membership, subscription business with Sam's Club, plus e-commerce.
- ▶ 2:20:07 Ben Gilbert And there are some crazy stats about Sam's Club.
- ▶ 2:20:09 Ben Gilbert Like, somehow in the nineties, one in three US households had a Sam's Club membership.
- ▶ 2:21:29 David Rosenthal So, Saul Price, of course, as we talked about, and Jim Senegal, who worked for him, were big pioneers of the shopping club, you know, Costco, Price Club, Sam's Club model.
- ▶ 2:22:09 David Rosenthal While we're talking about things that Walmart has not executed on to, um, Sam's level of rigor, shall we say over the years, you know, international again, it's like Sam's club.
- ▶ 2:25:13 David Rosenthal Well, and well, they did on grocery, but on, um, discount clubs in the Costco in Sam's club, if they'd executed well on all of those, their growth could have been much, much higher.
- ▶ 2:36:43 David Rosenthal They have in recent years been closing a large number of Sam's Clubs, and I think a lot of that real estate they've been converting into e-commerce distribution centers.
- ▶ 2:36:59 Ben Gilbert I think in closing all those Sam's clubs, they basically lay off all the employees and then say, all right, now you can interview at this building that will be converted into an e-commerce distribution center, and we can figure out if…