Sam’s Club’s $30 Billion Bet on Convenience: How Rick Ton Helped Reinvent Checkout

Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of their current or former employer.

Rick Ton watched one of his marketing specialists don a superhero cape in the middle of a Sam’s Club. Nearby, an associate handed out fresh-baked cookies while the mouthwatering aroma of apple pie wafted through the aisles. Shoppers paused, bemused – exactly the reaction Rick was hoping for. It was an unorthodox scene for a big-box retailer, but Rick, then Senior Marketing Director at Sam’s Club, had a mission that justified the theatrics: to persuade everyday Americans to change the way they shop.

His team’s bold experiments, from free food samples to costumed “line-busting” antics, were all part of a high-stakes plan to push Sam’s Club into a convenience-first experience by upgrading a sterile format through the launch and scale of Scan & Go, its mobile self-checkout. The result of Rick’s campaign would astonish even the C-suite at Walmart’s headquarters. Within just a few years, Scan & Go grew from a tiny pilot to handling one-third of all Sam’s Club transactions, about $30 billion in sales.

About Rick Ton

Rick is a passionate foodie and family man, dedicating his time to wife, Theresa, and child, Sebastian. When he’s not spending time with his family, he’s likely throwing down in the kitchen, whipping up his own fermented hot sauce and perfecting aged miso. His family even has its own yuzu tree to make koshō. Not one to shy away from Texas brisket or a portion of galbijjim, Rick’s also become a fitness enthusiast as a way to balance out the indulgent culinary lifestyle.

Flat Sales and a Bold Idea

When Rick Ton joined Sam’s Club, the Walmart-owned warehouse retailer was stuck in neutral. Overall revenues were healthy – about $60 billion at the time – but in-store growth was flat and membership trends looked anemic. Sam’s Club faced intense competition on all sides: arch-rival Costco was thriving on rock-solid customer loyalty, and many Sam’s locations literally shared a parking lot with Walmart supercenters, making it too easy for shoppers to defect next door.

 “One of the challenges Sam’s Club faced was a very viable competitor, and also their direct competitor is the largest company in the world,” Rick recalls of those early days. The question looming over Sam’s leadership was how to spark new growth and differentiate the club from its rivals.

Rick and his colleagues zeroed in on one strategic lever they believed Costco and others had overlooked: convenience. In an era when consumers were increasingly conditioned by one-tap app experiences, Sam’s saw an opportunity to leapfrog the competition by reimagining the checkout process itself. The breakthrough idea emerged from an internal hackathon: A pair of engineers built a prototype of a “pocket self-checkout” that would let shoppers scan items with their phone as they shopped, pay in-app, and skip the checkout line entirely. This was Scan & Go, a mobile feature promising the holy grail of retail convenience.

For Rick, a marketing leader who’d cut his teeth in roles at Walgreens, Under Armour, and even Meta’s growth marketing team, the Scan & Go concept was electrifying. It was exactly the kind of innovation that could jump-start digital adoption in a legacy retail environment. “Sam’s Club was $60 billion at the time, now they’re $90 billion in sales. Oftentimes, people think that innovation can’t happen in big settings like that,” Rick says. 

He saw Scan & Go as the vehicle to prove the skeptics wrong. Sam’s Club’s top brass saw the potential, too. They set lofty goals for the nascent app feature, envisioning 10%, then 20%, and eventually 30% of transactions flowing through Scan & Go. Hitting those targets would require not just tech deployment, but a massive shift in shopper behavior. Rick stepped up to help lead the charge, joining the founding go-to-market team tasked with turning a hackathon prototype into a nationwide game-changer.

Early on, the challenges were immense. For one, the Scan & Go feature wasn’t immediately integrated into the main Sam’s Club app. In the pilot phase it lived in a separate app, meaning Rick’s team had to convince members to download another app just to try this new way of shopping. The technology itself was unproven at scale. The app struggled with stability issues and an incomplete product catalog (at first, only about 50% of items could be purchased via Scan & Go, since things like weighted produce or gasoline weren’t supported). As Rick puts it, “imagine you’re filling up your cart and then half the items can’t be purchased [in the app]. You’re just gonna churn from that experience.”

Guerrilla Marketing Meets Growth Hacking

Rick Ton knew that traditional marketing alone wasn’t going to drive the kind of adoption Scan & Go needed. This was mainstream America – busy moms and dads in Texas, retirees in Oklahoma, students in the Midwest – many of whom were not naturally inclined to download a shopping app or trust their phone to handle checkout. “I always say the Midwest represents the heart, but also the most difficult audience to drive adoption,” Rick explains. Growing up just outside Chicago himself, he understood that what flies in San Francisco might flop in Springfield. Rick’s team embraced a scrappy, all-hands-on-deck marketing approach that blended digital savvy with old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground hustle.

Yet for all the digital marketing firepower, Rick realized that conquering the second cohort of users (beyond the initial tech enthusiasts) required meeting customers face-to-face on the store floor. “User acquisition was the hardest for the second cohort,” he notes – those everyday members who weren’t downloading apps on a whim. So Rick’s team got creative, rolling out a series of on-site “guerilla marketing” tactics that would make a growth-hacker proud. If a member was standing in a long checkout line, a Sam’s associate might approach and offer to walk them through signing up for Scan & Go on the spot, often with a free gift or sample as incentive. “We would have literally people standing there line-busting, giving out free samples of food to break their time, break their visual planes.”

In one memorable stunt, he even had team members dress up in eye-catching costumes. “I actually put some people on my team in superhero costumes just to really throw them off because we had to break through,” he says.

Crucially, these wild ideas weren’t just ad-hoc gimmicks; they were structured as field experiments. Rick and his colleagues treated each store activation like a test, measuring lifts in app downloads and Scan & Go usage whenever they tried a new tactic. “I would go constantly to the Dallas and Vegas regions to run experiments to figure out which experiences will help drive velocity,” Rick says of this hands-on period. This data-driven approach grounded the wackiest ideas in real metrics. And it needed to, because the targets from leadership were daunting. “We had this goal from leadership to get to 30% adoption…This is when we were [only at] 5%,” Rick recalls. 

There was no single magic ad campaign that would triple usage overnight. In fact, Rick realized early on that even an unlimited marketing budget wouldn’t be enough. “We couldn’t see a happy path [at first]. We couldn’t just spend our way there,” he admits. The cost per incremental user to reach tens of millions of members was, in his words, “crazy high” if relying purely on paid acquisition. Success would depend on continuous innovation, tweaking the product, smoothing onboarding, nudging behavior change, and relentlessly learning from the field.

A Checkout Revolution Goes Mainstream

After years of hustle and constant refinement, Rick Ton’s audacious campaign paid off. Scan & Go became a runaway success, fundamentally transforming how Sam’s Club members shop. What started as a scrappy pilot in 30 stores blossomed into a feature used across all 600+ Sam’s Clubs nationwide. Rick and his team had set out to achieve 30% adoption, and they hit it. By 2023, roughly 1 in 3 in-store transactions at Sam’s Club were being processed through Scan & Go. “If 10 people go in the store and make a purchase, 3 or 4 of those will be using the Scan & Go app to pay. That’s basically like [using a] credit card,” Rick notes, underscoring the magnitude of this behavioral shift. 

In raw numbers, the impact was enormous. Within about five years, the Scan & Go app went from zero to facilitating on the order of $30 billion in annual sales. The Sam’s Club mobile app, which had only about 40,000 users when Rick started, grew to well over 15 million active users as Scan & Go gained popularity. “The scale of which it operates is quite huge,” Rick says modestly – a bit of an understatement when you consider that Sam’s Club’s total yearly revenue also leapt from $60 billion to $90 billion during roughly the same period.

By the time Scan & Go reached that 30% adoption milestone, Rick had passed the baton and moved on from Sam’s Club. After three intense years shepherding the project from inception to ubiquity, he felt it was the right moment to seek new challenges. “I was there from its inception to the point we got to about 30%, and then I exited the organization,” he says.

In his next moves, including a stint heading marketing for a tech startup and advising other companies, Rick has carried the lessons of Scan & Go with him. Looking back, he’s proud not just of the numbers, but of how the team achieved them. The experience reinforced his belief that growth comes from a blend of smart strategy, willingness to get your hands dirty on the front lines, and a culture that encourages calculated risks.

Stories like Rick Ton’s show how bold marketing, grounded in data, can transform an entire business. To keep up with Rick’s career, check out his website and follow him on LinkedIn. At Bidease, we partner with brands that have bold creative visions like Rick Ton’s—turning challenges into growth engines with transparent, performance-driven mobile marketing. Learn more at bidease.com.