---
title: "Walmart Moves to the Opposite Side of Sam's Club"
description: "Walmart's first store of its new-generation compact format officially opened in Chengdu. The 3,000-square-meter single-story store, with about 10,000 SKUs, was remodeled from a store that had been operating for twenty years, restructuring its product mix, spatial layout, and omnichannel experience. On one hand, it highlights Walmart's differentiation in fresh and food products, while also emphasizing fulfillment services such as scheduled delivery, citywide delivery, nationwide delivery, and direct supplier delivery. It is reported that Walmart will use this store format as a blueprint to accelerate the upgrade of stores across the country, with plans to upgrade and open over 100 stores nationwide within the year."
author: "谢璇"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2026-06-03"
categories: "Retail Formats"
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---

# Walmart Moves to the Opposite Side of Sam's Club

> Walmart's first store of its new-generation compact format officially opened in Chengdu. The 3,000-square-meter single-story store, with about 10,000 SKUs, was remodeled from a store that had been operating for twenty years, restructuring its product mix, spatial layout, and omnichannel experience. On one hand, it highlights Walmart's differentiation in fresh and food products, while also emphasizing fulfillment services such as scheduled delivery, citywide delivery, nationwide delivery, and direct supplier delivery. It is reported that Walmart will use this store format as a blueprint to accelerate the upgrade of stores across the country, with plans to upgrade and open over 100 stores nationwide within the year.

Walmart's first store of its new-generation compact format officially opened in Chengdu.
The 3,000-square-meter single-story store, with about 10,000 SKUs, was remodeled from a store that had been operating for twenty years, restructuring its product mix, spatial layout, and omnichannel experience.
On one hand, it highlights Walmart's differentiation in fresh and food products, while also emphasizing fulfillment services such as scheduled delivery, citywide delivery, nationwide delivery, and direct supplier delivery.
It is reported that Walmart will use this store format as a blueprint to accelerate the upgrade and renovation of stores across the country, with plans to upgrade and open over 100 stores nationwide within the year.
From the renovation and adjustment of existing store formats to the reinvention of its long-dormant private brand "Marketside" (沃集鲜), Walmart is undergoing dramatic changes, following the shifting winds of the retail market.
Some people today call Walmart a "Sam's Club alternative," while others see this attempt as another form of transformation for large supermarkets.
But a closer look reveals that Walmart's transformation strategy also reflects the changes in the current offline retail market environment in China. Small-packaged products for small and medium-sized families and channel construction that reaches deep into the capillaries of the market are almost the opposite of the Sam's Club model.
************Omnichannel Construction****
In 1996, Walmart brought the hypermarket format to China. Through standardized global supply chains, one-stop shopping experiences, and mature operating systems, hypermarkets became the core format of domestic physical retail.
However, with the concentrated outbreak of new formats such as e-commerce, community group buying, hard discount stores, and membership stores, the number of traditional hypermarket stores in China has continued to shrink. Walmart closed 129 stores in six years, Carrefour completely withdrew from the Chinese market, and Metro completed a localized equity acquisition. The once-popular hypermarket is no longer in vogue.
At the same time, warehouse membership stores represented by Sam's Club have risen like a dark horse, rapidly gaining popularity in the Chinese market.
But for the vast and diverse Chinese market, Sam's Club cannot be the complete answer. From the daily instant replenishment needs of single people and small and medium-sized families to the high-frequency essential needs of three meals a day, consumers' increasingly differentiated purchasing needs still need to be met.
On this basis, Walmart started exploring new store formats and models with community stores. In December 2025, Walmart opened four new community stores in Shenzhen. It is reported that after completing market validation, its community format has entered the stage of scaled replication.
With an area of about 500 square meters, these stores offer about 2,000 selected SKUs. The product range revolves around "five meals a day," and the location strategy revolves around a "10-minute walking life circle."
To date, Walmart has about 10 community stores, and they are still only in Shenzhen. This community store format, characterized by being "small, refined, and close," is the smallest store format among all Walmart's operations in China.
At the same time, based on the community store model, Walmart also opened two "Ma Shu Stores" (玛薯店) in Shenzhen in collaboration with Xiaohongshu.
These stores are innovative retail experience spaces co-created by Walmart and Xiaohongshu. Under the model of "integrating consumer insights and collaborative product development," Walmart's private brand "Marketside" has launched nearly 20 co-branded products.
The investment in community stores is not only Walmart's strategy but also a collective choice of the current retail market.
Hema's community supermarket brand "Chaohe Suan NB" (超盒算NB) has surpassed 400 stores nationwide, with over 200 new stores opened in 2025 alone, becoming the core growth engine within the Hema system. Aldi plans to add over 50 new stores in the Chinese market by 2026, and currently has about 100 stores.
Since 2023, Aldi's store count in China has increased at an average annual rate of 40%. Meituan's community supermarket brand "Happy Monkey" (快乐猴) also opened three stores in one day in March, entering Ningbo and Beijing markets, covering six cities, and entering an accelerated expansion phase for replication in other regions.
A research report from Yongxing Securities shows that under intense competition and the impact of e-commerce platforms, the supermarket industry has developed four major trends: omnichannel development integrating online and offline for traditional retailers, warehouse membership store operations, community commerce for convenient living circles, and discount retail and private brand development as operational breakthroughs.
Clearly, Walmart does not want to miss any of these current trends.
In addition to community stores, Walmart's compact store format, which focuses on urban mass middle-class families and single people, is more like a supplement to the offline channel matrix with larger stores.
Moreover, in December 2025, Walmart's official app launched multiple fulfillment methods, including express delivery, scheduled delivery, citywide delivery, nationwide delivery, and global shopping.
From community stores in the 10-minute living circle to one-stop shopping within a 5-kilometer radius, and then to the online delivery system, Walmart is gradually building an omnichannel structure based on community stores, large stores, and online platforms.
****Marketside with Small Packaging****
But for chain supermarkets, to achieve real change, products remain the foundation.
In November last year, Walmart Group began the renewal and upgrade of the Marketside brand. Zhu Jun, Senior Vice President of Walmart China, even said bluntly: "We no longer focus on financial indicators."
However, doing private label is nothing new. The "China Private Brand Development Research Report (2025-2026)" shows that at the supplier level, 80% of enterprises have seen continuous growth in private brand supply, with private brand SKUs accounting for 20% of suppliers' total SKUs.
Not only Sam's Club, but domestic enterprises represented by Pang Donglai have also achieved very impressive sales results with their private labels.
Public data shows that DL's sales soared from 75 million yuan in 2022 to 6 billion yuan in 2025, an 80-fold increase in three years, driving the company's overall sales up 3.4 times.
At the same time, including Hema's Hema Workshop and Fresh Everyday, Yonghui's Yonghui Preferred, and RT-Mart's Chaosheng and Runfa Select, a series of domestic supermarkets have developed private brands. So how can Marketside, which has fallen behind, break through in fierce competition?
Among these, "Sam's Club alternative" is one of the most attractive labels for Marketside. Drawing on Sam's Club's experience is also an important reason why Marketside has quickly gained market attention.
For example, Sam's Club sells black truffle ham soda crackers at 39.9 yuan per 1.16kg, while Marketside sells them at 9.99 yuan per 285g. Sam's Club sells 300ml×24 bottles of Bama weak alkaline water for 22.8 yuan, while Marketside sells 20 bottles of the same specification for 19.99 yuan.
At the same time, products such as Korean-style fried sauce noodles, oolong tea, egg tarts, golden salted egg yolk potato chips, and apple slices have been widely promoted on social media platforms.
While Sam's Club is facing doubts about product downgrades and member complaints, Walmart, without the burden of scarcity and concerns, has achieved a reversal in reputation by offering similar quality to Sam's Club at cheaper prices.
According to data previously disclosed by Walmart China, about 30% of sales on the Walmart app come from cities where no physical stores have been established, and private brand products account for a relatively high proportion of orders.
The gross margin of private brands is 15%-20% higher than that of ordinary products, which also brings more considerable revenue. Currently, Marketside has about 4,000 SKUs, covering all categories including bakery, fresh, dairy, and snacks.
But merely being at the level of a "Sam's Club alternative" is still not enough for Marketside.
According to relevant Walmart staff, the current users of Marketside are mostly young people around 30 years old. To adapt to their needs, Marketside focuses on small-packaged products for single people or small families in product development.
With the same supply chain system, cheaper prices, no membership restrictions, and denser store networks, will Walmart become a supplement to Sam's Club or a strong competitor? This still needs time to be tested.
From store adjustments to increased investment in private brands, this is an iteration of Walmart's business model and a microcosm of the systemic transformation of the supermarket retail industry.
In an era of stagnant growth and stock competition, the essence of competition in the retail industry has returned to efficiency competition. In the future, Walmart's effectiveness in resolving internal conflicts between business formats, stabilizing the quality reputation of its private brand fresh products, and balancing the operating costs of stores across all channels will directly determine whether it can escape the structural decline of traditional hypermarkets.
After all, only with more precise products and more efficient operations can it break free from difficulties in the era of drastic changes in the retail industry and rediscover its sense of the current consumer market.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 谢璇
- Published: 2026-06-03
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/walmart-moves-to-the-opposite-side-of-sam-s-club-b636e396/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gS2ob_R_UFga6k1nkb4cmQ

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