Walmart and Sam’s Club Are Becoming One Operating System With Two Storefronts

On June 22, Walmart used the opening day of Cannes Lions to announce that Sam’s Club Member Access Platform, the club’s retail media business known as MAP, would be rebranded as Sam’s Club Connect, part of a plan to align tools, technology, and platforms across Walmart Connect U.S., Walmart Connect International, and Sam’s Club. The ad business behind the new name launched in 2009 and has carried the MAP identity since 2017, as Adweek noted in its Cannes coverage. The company said the three advertising businesses will continue to operate as distinct units serving their own markets while becoming increasingly aligned around a shared vision.

Covered on its own, the rebrand reads as an advertising story. It is not. It is the third public act of a structural program that began in September 2024, accelerated through a January reorganization, and now touches nearly every system a supplier or seller operates on across both banners. To understand why it matters, it helps to understand how deliberately separate these two businesses were built to be, and how long that separation was defended.

The Separation Was a Founding Decision, Not an Accident

Sam’s Club opened its first club in 1983 in Midwest City, Oklahoma, and grew fast, acquiring 91 PACE clubs from Kmart in 1993 to reach 428 locations by the close of that fiscal year. From the beginning, the distance from the parent was intentional. When Sam Walton established the club, he said he wanted it to have a separate culture from Walmart, as Modern Retail recounted in its coverage of the 2024 supply chain merger. That intent hardened into infrastructure over four decades. Sam’s Club ran its own systems for tracking inventory and managing purchasing, staffed its own engineering, warehouse, and product teams, and functioned as a largely self-contained operation even as it shared a hometown and a parent with the world’s largest retailer.

The separation was tested from outside more than once. For years, a segment of Wall Street argued the two businesses would be better off apart. In 2013, Talk Business & Politics chronicled the recurring debate, quoting Belus Capital Advisors CEO Brian Sozzi arguing Walmart should shed the club outright and Bentonville-based consultant Carol Spieckerman observing that spinoff rumors had flared and faded repeatedly over the years. At the time, Sam’s Club generated about 12 percent of Walmart’s sales but only 7 percent of its profits. The debate resurfaced in 2015, when TheStreet laid out the spinoff math, valuing the club at roughly $58 billion in net sales, about half the size of Costco, and noting that analysts argued both sides: some held that Sam’s Club was too integrated to separate, others that the two businesses shared too little operationally to justify keeping them together. Walmart never acted on any of it.

That history is what gives the current moment its weight. The company that spent decades declining to formalize the separation into a breakup is now dissolving the operational half of the separation entirely. And the executives doing it know the club from the inside. Doug McMillon ran Sam’s Club from 2006 to 2009 before rising to run Walmart International and then the company. John Furner, who became CEO of Walmart Inc. this February, held the same Sam’s Club CEO job in the late 2010s. Kath McLay ran the club from 2019 to 2023 before taking over Walmart International, and Chris Nicholas ran it from 2023 until this January’s reshuffle made him CEO of Walmart International. Sam’s Club has served as the proving ground for the people who end up running Walmart, which means the convergence now underway is being executed by leaders who came up inside the business being converged.

The Supply Chain Merged First, and the Trade Press Moved On

The earliest and most concrete move drew the least strategic attention. In September 2024, a memo from David Guggina, then Walmart’s executive vice president of supply chain operations, first reported by Business Insider, confirmed that Sam’s Club’s corporate supply chain team was merging into Walmart’s. Guggina called it a supply chain “future-ready to serve both Sam’s Club and Walmart for the long-term” and no job cuts were anticipated in the transition.

The before-state described above explains why this mattered more than the muted coverage suggested. A former Sam’s Club supply chain employee told Modern Retail the integration was “a massive, massive change” for a business that had run its own systems since the Walton era. The physical layer was already partly shared. Walmart’s distribution network handled some Sam’s Club inventory before the merger, and the integration was expected to deepen that, potentially opening Walmart’s broader fulfillment network and automation investment to the club.

Guggina is now president and CEO of Walmart U.S. The architect of the supply chain merger runs the flagship banner, one more data point in the pattern of club-tested executives carrying the integration forward.

The January Reorganization Turned Convergence Into Structure

The supply chain merger could have remained a one-off efficiency play. The January 16 leadership announcement made clear it was not. In that announcement, incoming Walmart Inc. CEO John Furner described the company as “centralizing our platforms to accelerate shared capabilities” so operating segments could stay closer to customers and members.

The org chart change matters more than the quote. Seth Dallaire was elevated from chief growth officer of Walmart U.S. to chief growth officer of Walmart Inc., with responsibility for global enterprise platforms including Walmart Connect, Walmart+, Walmart Data Ventures, Vizio, Sam’s Club MAP, and a global Marketplace platform. Read that portfolio carefully. The club’s ad business and a global Marketplace platform now report to the same executive, alongside membership and data monetization. That is not an advertising decision. It is a decision about which capabilities belong to a banner and which belong to the enterprise.

The June rebrand executed what January designed. Walmart reported that global advertising revenue grew 37 percent in its most recent quarter, with Walmart Connect U.S. up 44 percent excluding the Vizio acquisition, numbers that explain why advertising became the first platform to wear the shared identity publicly. The rebrand also had a preview. At the Evercore ISI Consumer and Retail Conference on June 10, Dallaire told investors that Walmart treats retail media, membership, and the marketplace as one connected machine rather than a set of standalone ventures, and the club’s advertising business was among the operations he referenced, as Retail TouchPoints reported in its coverage of the rebrand.

The Delivery Network and the Discovery Pipe Already Run on Shared Rails

E-commerce is where convergence stops being organizational and becomes operational. When Sam’s Club expanded its one-hour express delivery nationally in April, it did so drawing on in-house Walmart technology for real-time inventory visibility and fulfillment optimization, and, as FreightWaves reported in its coverage of the expansion, both Sam’s Club and Walmart crowdsource delivery drivers through the same Spark app. Sam’s Club’s own account confirmed the plumbing: the technology behind express delivery was built in-house and integrated with Walmart’s enterprise platform. The results were not modest. The club fulfilled nearly 65,000 express deliveries in its first weeks, averaging 55 minutes from order to door.

Discovery is converging the same way. The agentic shopping experience Walmart announced with Google in January, built on the Universal Commerce Protocol inside Gemini, is built to automatically include both Walmart and Sam’s Club in-store and online products when relevant, per the January announcement. The same announcement extends the shared pipe past discovery: for customers who link accounts, the experience reaches into existing carts at either banner and carries membership benefits from both Walmart+ and Sam’s Club. For item content and data quality teams, that is one front door for AI-driven discovery serving two banners, which means content built to one standard increasingly performs, or fails, in both places.

The flow runs in both directions, which keeps this from being an absorption story. As CNBC has reported, Sam’s Club has originated technologies that Walmart later adopted, Scan & Go among them, and its Grapevine, Texas club serves as a testing ground for emerging technology. The club that was built to be culturally separate became, in practice, the enterprise’s laboratory.

What Converges Is the Plumbing. The Member Is Not on the Table.

Walmart has been consistent that the banners themselves are not merging, and the caution deserves to be taken seriously rather than read past. Harvey Ma, vice president and general manager of the club’s advertising business, told Kiri Masters of the trade newsletter Retail Media Breakfast Club at Cannes that the club’s distinct character is the point: “that DNA will remain, even though we are now united under one family.” Masters drew the useful distinction from the interview: what merges cleanly was never what made the club worth advertising on in the first place, and the member relationship stays separate on purpose.

Ma gave that distinction a structural basis. The two banners’ shopper bases overlap less than commonly assumed, he said in the same interview, because warehouse shopping selects for households that can haul bulk purchases home, while Walmart runs a rich mass business in dense urban areas where a bulk trip makes no practical sense. No amount of shared infrastructure converts one of those shoppers into the other.

That distinction is the practical frame for suppliers, and it echoes the founding logic. Walton separated the club because a membership business and a mass discounter need different cultures. Nothing in the current program contradicts that. Merchandising, membership economics, the curated club assortment, and the member relationship stay banner-specific. What Walton’s era never anticipated was a layer of the business, measurement, fulfillment technology, delivery labor, data infrastructure, and discovery pipes, that works better shared than separate. That layer is what is being unified.

The implications split cleanly by segment. For 1P suppliers, the operative fact is the supply chain: one organization now plans replenishment, network design, and automation investment across both banners, so forecasting conversations and OTIF-style execution standards developed for one banner should be expected to inform the other. Suppliers selling into both should treat supply chain capability as a single relationship with two demand signals, not two relationships. For 3P Marketplace sellers, nothing has changed between the banners, and the honest read on banner convergence is structural rather than actionable: Dallaire holding Sam’s Club Connect and a global Marketplace platform in the same portfolio is the strongest hint on record about where it could eventually go.

But the Marketplace half of that portfolio is already consolidating along a different axis. Modern Retail reported from Associates Week in June that Manish Joneja, who ran the U.S. marketplace, now oversees global marketplaces and fulfillment services, and that Walmart has begun cross-border fulfillment, collecting seller inventory in Vietnam and China and staging it near or inside the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, with systems in development to track tariff and tax costs on global shipments. That is the build-once pattern advertising just wore publicly, applied across countries rather than banners. Sellers should treat the geographic consolidation as the live development and the banner question as the org chart to watch.

The direction of travel was stated plainly to investors before it was staged in Cannes. On the fourth quarter earnings call in February, Furner described Walmart’s technology strategy as building once and scaling globally, and CFO John David Rainey told investors the company is now aligned globally on common platforms across technology, AI, and digital businesses. Four decades after Walton drew the line between the two businesses, and more than a decade after analysts publicly made the case for breaking the two apart, Walmart chose a third path neither side proposed: keep both storefronts, unify everything beneath them. Suppliers and sellers planning their next JBP cycle or Connect budget should assume that any capability Walmart announces for one banner is a preview of the other.

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