Sam’s Club is a membership-only warehouse retailer owned by Walmart Inc., with hundreds of locations across the United States. While positioned as a discount bulk-shopping alternative to Costco, Sam’s Club inherits Walmart’s broader record: an aggressive low-price model that squeezes suppliers, undermines small businesses, and drives wealth out of local economies.
Walmart, and by extension Sam’s Club, has been widely criticized for its anti-union tactics, including surveillance, intimidation, and store closures in response to organizing efforts. Its supply chains are tied to low-wage overseas manufacturing and industrial agriculture with high carbon emissions, while political lobbying and tax strategies protect corporate interests at the expense of workers and communities.
Boycotting Sam’s Club is inseparable from boycotting Walmart, whose size and influence shape global labor, sourcing, and retail practices.
Walmart’s legacy of ultra-low prices may look good at checkout, but recent data reveal a darker reality: communities with a new Walmart Supercenter experience average household incomes falling by 6% over a decade, about $5,000 less per household, and poverty rising by 8%, despite consumer price savings.
Walmart’s dominant pricing and supplier leverage create a monopsony effect, suppressing wages and undermining local businesses and industries, further destabilizing regional economies.
Coupled with documented union-busting, exploitative supplier demands, high-deforestation agricultural sourcing, and aggressive tax and lobbying strategies, Walmart’s structural harm extends well beyond its stores. Its model extracts wealth from communities, compounding economic precarity even as it sells “low prices."