Sam’s Club Puts One-Hour Delivery on the Clock at 600 Clubs

Sam’s Club added a one-hour Express Delivery tier across its more than 600 U.S. clubs on April 2, the retailer told trade publication Chain Store Age, moving the faster option from a regional test into the fleet. The tier sits on top of the existing three-hour Express window, with no minimum purchase and no markup on club prices. Plus members pay $10 for one-hour delivery and $5 for three-hour, while Club members pay $22 and $17 at the same tiers, according to the Sam’s Club Delivery from Club FAQ.

In the three weeks since rollout, members have placed nearly 65,000 Express orders, with the average order placed, shopped, and delivered in 55 minutes. The ten fastest deliveries arrived in under 12 minutes. Greg Pulsifer, senior vice president of e-commerce at Sam’s Club, said the tier was built in response to member feedback, per the same report.

Speed Is Being Picked Out of the Club, Not a Dark Store

The operational choice sitting underneath this announcement is the one worth paying attention to. Amazon’s 30-minute Now pilot in Seattle and Philadelphia runs out of purpose-built urban micro-fulfillment centers, as the company announced in December 2025. Amazon’s broader one-hour and three-hour tiers, which went live nationwide in mid-March, lean on its same-day fulfillment network. Sam’s Club is doing something different. Express orders are picked from live club inventory and handed off for last-mile delivery inside a 15-mile radius of the club, per the company’s published Delivery from Club parameters.

That model makes the club itself the speed-sensitive fulfillment node. Every Express order competes for the same shelves as the members walking the aisles.

The Grapevine Prototype Was Always Pointing Here

Sam’s Club signaled this direction more than a year before the Express expansion. When the retailer opened its Grapevine, Texas, innovation club in October 2024, it allocated roughly 6,000 square feet to Club Pickup and Delivery from Club fulfillment, about four times the space a standard club dedicates to those functions, Fox Business reported at the time. Sam’s Club CEO Chris Nicholas told the investment community in April 2025 that the company plans to open 15 new clubs a year and remodel all existing locations, with omnichannel fulfillment central to the design, as covered by Grocery Dive.

E-commerce has become the visible justification for that investment. Sam’s Club’s U.S. e-commerce sales grew 23% year over year in the fiscal fourth quarter ended January 31, 2026, according to Walmart’s Q4 FY26 earnings release. Transactions in the quarter rose 5.3%, CNBC reported, and total Sam’s Club U.S. net sales for the fiscal year reached roughly $93 billion.

What Suppliers Should Watch From Here

For Sam’s Club suppliers, the downstream question is not whether Express Delivery will scale. The order volume and average fulfillment time in the first three weeks suggest it already is. The question is what happens to an item when it is expected to leave the club within an hour of a member tapping “order.”

In-club availability windows tighten when any single SKU is being shopped simultaneously for the sales floor, curbside pickup, and one-hour delivery. The 15-mile delivery radius means one club is serving all three channels from a single inventory pool, and the clubs doing the most Express volume will be the ones feeling the pressure first.

Fresh and convenience categories also appear to be central to the Express mix. Sam’s Club identified water, produce, rotisserie chicken, and paper goods as a significant share of the orders, and Pulsifer referenced emergency baby essentials and last-minute dinners in his comments. Items that hold up under fast pick-pack handling, and that members reach for in a hurry, are doing disproportionate work inside this tier.

Packaging is the third pressure point. A unit designed for pallet-facing and shelf-facing use is now also being evaluated on how well it survives a handoff to a third-party last-mile driver in a private vehicle, often without secondary protection. Categories with fragility, temperature sensitivity, or leak risk should expect more scrutiny at line review.

The 1P and 3P distinction does not split cleanly on this topic. Express Delivery is a 1P, club-inventory program. Sam’s Club’s third-party Marketplace operates on a separate fulfillment track and is not part of the Express tier as announced.

Why the Price Points Are the Real Signal

The $10 Plus-member fee for one-hour delivery sits essentially at parity with Amazon’s $9.99 Prime fee for its one-hour tier, which TechCrunch reported went live in March. Sam’s Club is not positioning one-hour as a premium service. The company is positioning it as a baseline option that sits next to the three-hour tier rather than above it, and it is doing so without a minimum basket size. That pricing choice, held against the 55-minute average fulfillment time the retailer is already hitting, is what suppliers and category managers should read as the operating thesis: speed as a default expectation at the club level, not as a surge product.

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