Sam's Club is converting shuttered stores into e-commerce fulfillment centers.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the retailer will repurpose a 150,000-square-foot, Chicago-area Sam's Club store that closed in January as an e-commerce fulfillment center by the end of the year. The store will become a regional hub for deliveries to customers of online purchases by Sam’s Club members within a several-hundred-mile radius of Chicago. This will be Sam's Club's second store retrofitted as a fulfillment center. In June the retailer converted a 130,000-square-foot store in Memphis, Tenn., into a fulfillment center.
Earlier this year the warehouse club said it would close 63 stores and retrofit 12 of them as e-commerce fulfillment centers.
The retailer said it is considering conversions in Florida, Texas, the mid-Atlantic, Southern California and the Northeast.
By Brannon Boswell
Executive Editor, Commerce + Communities Today
