When the annual renewal reminder from Sam’s Club appears on a phone, many members no longer reflexively hit “pay.” What used to feel like a small administrative task—renewing access to bulk bargains and curated goods—has become a moment of calculation about food safety, delivery reliability and whether the premium shopping experience still justifies a yearly fee.
Sam’s Club’s membership model in China rests on a simple promise: pay a fixed fee up front and buy the rest of the year with lower decision costs and greater certainty about product quality and availability. That promise is fraying. A string of incidents over the past year—ranging from a consumer in Shenzhen finding a live mouse in a mochi box during a “fast delivery” drop-off in December 2025 to a Nanchang family discovering a glass-like fragment in a freshly cooked bun in May 2025—has amplified customer anxiety because these are failures in the parts of the retail chain members are supposed to trust implicitly.
The problem is not only isolated errors. Members complain that product packaging, labeling and cold-chain consistency have shown recurrent issues, and some stores have been criticised for pushing premium upgrades aggressively, which erodes service quality and goodwill. For a membership retailer, these are structural faults: the business sells reassurance more than a handful of loss-leading SKUs, and when reassurance wanes the perceived value of the subscription declines.
China’s social media ecosystem magnifies every misstep. Viral posts about foreign objects or spoiled perishables travel fast, and repeated stories create what behavioural economists would call an “emotional accumulation” effect: each fresh episode increases the perceived probability of future problems. Consumers no longer worry about whether one problem was real; they worry about whether the system has the resilience to stop it happening again.
The weak points are familiar: last-mile logistics and unattended pick-up locations, high-touch ready-to-eat and bakery items with complex processing steps, and consistency across cold-chain and packaging. Expansion multiplies these vulnerabilities. As Sam’s Club opens more stores, adds more suppliers and routes more products through regional processing sites, maintaining a homogenous standard becomes harder and any lapse is amplified by scale.
There is also a strategic choice at play. To sustain high renewal rates Sam’s must preserve a differentiated assortment and dependable service. Yet recent assortment moves—bringing in more mass-market brands or delisting some high-repurchase favourites—have diluted the aura of exclusivity that once justified the fee. When a membership’s unique benefits slip toward being merely convenient rather than reliably superior, renewals convert from a habit into a cost–benefit calculation.
That calculation matters not just to Sam’s Club but to the wider membership-retail model in China. Many households shifted to membership formats to lower daily decision costs and to “pre-pay” for trust in food safety and supply continuity. If trust is perceived as compromised, consumers will either reduce dependence on the format or split purchases across channels, weakening lifetime customer value.
Sam’s still has clear assets: efficient warehousing, a record of creating hit SKUs and a sizeable base of loyal, urban family shoppers. The path back is operational and communicative. Firms must shore up last-mile pest control and handling protocols, tighten QC in high-touch categories, restore transparency around sourcing and recalls, and limit sales practices that feel coercive. Repairing the “trust deposit” requires visible fixes and compensating customer experiences when things go wrong.
For Chinese consumers, pausing a membership has become a pragmatic defensive choice rather than a symbolic rejection. For Sam’s Club the implication is stark: continued growth is possible, but only if scale is matched by a renewed obsession with the baseline experience that first drove households to pay for membership in the first place. The coming quarters will show whether the company can convert corrective measures into restored confidence, or whether an increasing number of members will let their subscriptions lapse and wait on the sidelines.