The Contract of Trust
An American who has never worked in China has just taken over merchandising at Sam’s Club China. Its Chinese members, the urban upper middle class, are cheering. What this improbable scene reveals about the most courted consumer in the country.
Opening: the improbable scene
On 22 September 2026, Walmart announced the appointment of a new head of merchandising for Sam’s Club China, the role that decides what 10.7 million member households will find on its shelves.
His name is Sean Jackson. American. More than thirty years in retail, at Foley’s, at Linens’n Things, then at Sam’s Club in the US, where he ran non-food merchandising. Nothing in his career runs through China. He does not speak Chinese, of course. He probably has no idea what makes a good taro mochi, why Sam’s rice pudding had its own fan groups on Xiaohongshu, or how to tell a well-chosen durian. On paper, he is the caricature of the mistake multinationals have been making in China for thirty years: parachute in someone from headquarters, ignore the ground.
And yet the improbable happened. On Xiaohongshu and in members’ WeChat groups, a large and vocal share of the reactions said, in essence: “finally.” Finally someone who knows the trade. Finally, perhaps, the return of the real Sam’s. Chinese consumers are applauding Sean Jackson’s arrival, welcoming almost as a liberator an American who does not know their market.
To understand this scene, we need to go back to what happened on the shelves over the past year. And above all, to understand who these members are, and what they had really been buying with their card.
I. The great success: thirty years in existence, and fifteen to become a phenomenon in China
Sam’s Club opened its first Chinese warehouse in Shenzhen in 1996. For twenty years, almost nothing happened: half a store a year on average, a handful of cities, a concept the market did not understand. Pay for the right to shop? In the China of Carrefour hypermarkets and wholesale markets, the idea seemed absurd. Sam’s waited. It may be the most underrated decision in its history: not forcing a model before the consumer it was built for existed.
That consumer emerged in the 2010s: the affluent urban household, car-owning, home-owning, time-poor, and increasingly wary of an online retail scene saturated with promotions and counterfeits. From 2016, the machine took off. The numbers trace one of the finest growth curves in global retail: around 4 million paying members in 2021, nearly 9 million at the end of 2024, 10.7 million today. Revenue rose from roughly 84 billion yuan in 2023 to 100 billion in 2024, then 140 billion in 2025 (about 17.5 billion euros), up 40%. Sixty-seven stores, ten openings in 2025 alone, a “100-store plan” openly embraced by Walmart China’s leadership, and a telling expansion: after the major cities, Sam’s is moving into wealthy counties, Kunshan, Jiangyin, Jinjiang, Yiwu..
The drivers of this success form a chain, and each link sets up the next.
- It all starts with trust, the scarcest commodity in Chinese retail: in a market burned by twenty years of food scandals and counterfeits, Sam’s built its reputation on a promise kept without apparent exception, quality checked before a product hits the shelf, not after the complaint.
- That quality in turn rests on selectivity: four thousand SKUs where a hypermarket lines up forty thousand, a handful of options per category, a ruthless veto over what gets in, and in-house exclusives found nowhere else.
- Put end to end, these three links produce Sam’s real product, which is neither the mochi nor the salmon: an outsourced buying service. Members are not paying 260 or 680 yuan to get into a store; they are paying to hire a professional buyer who selects on their behalf, in a country where shopping online has become a job of verification.
- And the loop closes on the economics of the model: a customer who has delegated the decision no longer compares; they come back. Frequent purchases, a stable basket, card renewal; profit comes from membership fees more than margins, so the retailer gains nothing by selling you more, only by keeping you. Where Chinese e-commerce buys traffic at a premium for customers who leave at the first competing coupon, Sam’s built the one thing a price war cannot attack: the loyal habit of ten million households.
- Add execution, with a distinctly Chinese invention, the network of urban mini-warehouses that delivers within an hour and generates nearly half of sales, and the picture of triumph is complete.
But this triumph carried its own tension. A 140-billion machine opening ten stores a year needs growth, traffic, digital. And in China, the skills that deliver those things are found in one place only: the big e-commerce platforms. That is where the story turns.
II. The year of the crack
At the end of 2025, Sam’s China changed hands. Liu Peng took charge of the business: a veteran of Chinese e-commerce trained at Alibaba, and with him came other executives from the same world, whom members would soon dub, with a touch of acidity, the “Alibaba clan” (阿里帮, ālǐ bāng). On paper, the hiring was impeccable: who knows the Chinese digital consumer better than the people who built the world’s biggest conversion machines? The mandate was legitimate: accelerate digital, delivery, growth.
Members sensed the difference almost immediately. And they did not like it.
Let’s tell it from their point of view. You pay 260 yuan a year (32 euros), or 680 (85 euros) for the premium card. One day, the product photos in the app, white, bare, factual, are replaced by retouched, oversaturated visuals plastered with marketing labels: “a whiff of Alibaba” (一股阿里味), one member writes, and the phrase goes viral. Another day, you look for the mochi or the rice pudding, the cult exclusives that justified the trip, and they have vanished from the shelves; in their place, ordinary brands available in any supermarket. Then come the quality incidents, serious enough that on 15 June 2026 the market regulator formally summoned Walmart China’s executives. The head of merchandising left the company “for personal reasons.” Cancellation hashtags spread.
Let’s pause on a detail almost every commentary missed: apart from the quality incidents, none of these signals was a price increase or a measurable downgrade in the range. A retouched photo costs the consumer nothing. An ordinary product on the shelf forces them to do nothing. And yet the anger was immediate and deep, deeper than a membership fee increase would have provoked.
Because members were not protesting against a product. They were protesting against a change in nature. And let’s note it right away: the executives targeted by the revolt were Chinese, talented, and came from the most admired companies in the country. Nationality was not the issue. The issue lay elsewhere.
III. What the 680-yuan Sam’s Club card really buys
First, let’s be clear about who signs this contract. With 140 billion yuan in sales across 10.7 million cards, the average annual spend of a Sam’s member is around 13,000 yuan (1,630 euros), at a single retailer, for only part of the household’s shopping. Compare that with the median urban household in Wuhan, which lives on about 10,000 yuan a month, all expenses included. The Sam’s member belongs to the top quintile of the cities where the chain operates: what the Chinese call, with their customary elasticity, 中产 (“middle class”), and which is in reality the upper end of the urban middle class, the exact segment every European brand is courting.
This member is a figure readers of this newsletter know well: the Shanghai or Shenzhen executive, overstretched, measured on KPIs from morning to night, surrounded by algorithms in every one of their apps. For them, shopping online has become one more job: outwitting promotional mechanics that take a spreadsheet to understand, sorting through products whose quality is never guaranteed, distrusting brands that no longer inspire them, checking every review knowing that some are fabricated. They can easily afford the good product, and they are ready to pay the premium. What they lack is everything else: the time to search, and the expertise to tell the difference.
What Sam’s was selling them was neither cheese nor pecans. It was the outsourced decision. Four thousand SKUs instead of forty thousand, a handful of options per category, in-house exclusives, unretouched photos, no coupons, no countdown timers. An implicit contract of biblical simplicity: I pay you, you choose for me, and you never play against me. The Chinese have an expression for this: 为信任付费, “paying for trust”. Sam’s was perhaps the last place in this executive’s life where they could buy without negotiating, without checking, without suspicion.
That is why a retouched photo weighs more than a price increase. A price increase is bad news within the contract. An “Alibaba-style” photo is the signal that the contract itself is changing, that the filter is becoming a seller, that the refuge is joining the world it used to protect against. Members read symbols before prices, and they read them fast.
Let’s be precise about what this contract is not: a form of superiority. The opposite contract exists and thrives. Hema, Douyin and Taobao sell the flow contract: test fast, rotate fast, come for the novelty, accept that this month’s cult product will be gone next month. Millions of Chinese consumers love both, often on the same day: flow for tonight’s dinner, selection for the monthly stock-up. The two models will coexist for the long term, because they meet different needs, and China may be the only market in the world where both have reached this level of maturity at the same time.
What does not work is the mix. When Hema copied the warehouse club with Hema X, the graft did not take: a rapid-testing logic does not know how to sustain a slow-moving but cult product. When Sam’s imported platform reflexes, the graft triggered rejection in the opposite direction. Both contracts are viable. They do not mix.
IV. The repairman from Arkansas
Now let’s reread the 22 September appointment in light of the contract.
What members are applauding is not an American. It is a ruling. Bentonville headquarters watched the revolt and the regulator’s summons, and made a call. Sean Jackson brings neither a Chinese network nor local intuition, and that is precisely what reassures: he brings no platform reflexes either. He embodies the warehouse-club buying tradition, the one that got the original contract signed. His ignorance of the Chinese market, disqualifying if the job were to invent an offer, becomes almost a guarantee when the job is to restore one: no one is asking him to understand Chinese taste, they are asking him to enforce a discipline.
And here again, note the clear-sightedness of those welcoming him. The same forums that say “finally” also say “we’ll judge by the shelves in three months,” and “will a man from American non-food understand Chinese fresh produce?” Trust is no more granted to an American passport than it was withdrawn from a Chinese one. It waits for action. The credit extended to Jackson lasts one restocking cycle.
V. The passport was never the question
Let’s widen the lens, because this affair says something European headquarters need to hear.
The same summer that Chinese members were calling for an American buyer, Sam’s China closed a year at 140 billion yuan in sales (about 17.5 billion euros), growing by around 40%, with 67 stores and a record opening pace. Aldi passed the 100-store mark and expanded beyond its historic base toward Nanjing. Costco continued to build its presence. Meanwhile, established Chinese brands were being punished without a second thought at the first breach of their promise.
There is no boycott of America on Chinese shelves. There is no local premium on membership cards. There is a court far more demanding than geopolitics: tens of millions of solvent consumers who read contracts better than most headquarters write them.
China’s upper middle class is neither nationalist nor Western-loving in its shopping. It is clear-eyed. That is more uncomfortable for everyone, and far more interesting.
Takeaways for executives
1. Identify the core promise your brand has signed with the Chinese consumer, and protect it from your own metrics. At Sam’s, it is a contract of trust: outsourced selection. Elsewhere, it is something else: lifestyle inspiration (Lululemon, Aesop), a technological edge (Apple, Dyson, Tesla), radical value for money (Aldi, Mixue). The question to ask in the executive committee is not “what are our numbers in China,” but “what did we promise, and do our KPIs measure whether we keep that promise, or something else?”
2. Symbols weigh more than prices. Your Chinese customers read a product photo, a package, a promotional mechanic as contractual clauses. Before approving a “small optimisation,” ask yourself what it says about the contract. At Sam’s, a retouched photo sparked more anger than a fee increase would have.
3. Your passport is neither a handicap nor an excuse. Sam’s, Aldi and Costco are posting their best years in China at the very moment geopolitical narratives predicted their eviction, with the country’s most solvent and most courted segment. Punishment and reward are decided by the discipline with which the contract is executed, never by origin.