The 7 Most Annoying Things About Shopping At Sam's Club

Everyone likes to save money, but what we save in dollars we often pay for in other ways. Shopping on Amazon? You'll have to make peace with the terrible truth that your dollars are adding to Jeff Bezos' pocket. Shopping at a warehouse club store like Sam's Club? You'll have to face a myriad of inconveniences and irritations in the name of saving a little cash. Is it worth it? That depends on how you typically feel when you peruse your receipt from your local supermarket, and in this economy, the despair may seem like a slowly inflating balloon.

If you've only recently decided to try saving some cash by shopping at a warehouse club store, you may still be weighing Costco against Sam's Club. Depending on who you ask, Costco is often said to have better quality products and a better selection. However, Sam's Club usually gets extra points for an easier shopping experience (mostly if you're willing to use Scan & Go). Neither store is without flaws or without dissenters, though. As a regular Sam's Club shopper, I can give you a whole list of things you might find irritating about the Sam's Club shopping experience. Maybe these things will bug you, or maybe they won't — just call them another piece of your informed decision-making process.

I seem to recall my children saying something about the pizza at the Sam's Club Cafe being good. Granted, this was I don't know how many years ago, but I remember the line — I do not remember the pizza.

I have not been back in that line since that one time and I don't think I will get in that line ever again, unless by some miracle, I walk past it one day and there's no wait time for a slice of pizza.

This is not — according to quite a number of Redditors — an experience unique to my local Sam's Club. A Reddit post by a brand new and very admirably enthusiastic Sam's Club Cafe employee lamented the backed up lines and upset customers. They asked fellow Redditors for advice on how to deal with working short staffed and got a myriad of responses, ranging from, "Thank you for your service" to "Don't take your job too seriously."

If you (or your child) must have some Cafe pizza, there is another way. You can preorder using the app, cut in line — potentially angering dozens of people who didn't use the app — and walk away with your pizza and the feeling of having gotten away with something.

There's no feeling like the feeling of getting a deal — and no annoyance quite like getting a deal and noticing that today's deal (or that other store's deal) is even better than the deal you got yesterday. Lots of stores may say, "Hey, no problem, let's give you a refund for the difference," but Sam's Club (except in certain circumstances) often replies with, "Ooh, sorry, bad luck! Next!"

Sam's Club's price matching policy, for lack of a better word, is sub-par. Sam's Club does not match competitor pricing, so there's no going to customer service with the Costco app to show them that you could have paid a dollar less for ketchup if only you'd been smart enough to buy a membership with their competitor. They may offer commiserations, but they will not give you your dollar back — says so right in their store policies.

You may have better luck getting your Sam's Club to match prices of another Sam's Club location, but that's at the discretion of each individual club, which basically means "no promises." They won't match prices on clearance and markdown items at all, so don't even bother getting in line for that one. Redditors say they don't match their own online pricing, either. Getting the best price can require some due diligence that not everyone has the diligence to do.

I have not personally had any problems with Scan & Go. This is Sam's Club's much-touted shopping technology that allows you to walk into the store, scan everything you put in your cart, pay in the app, and walk out again with none so much as a faint smile and an acknowledging grunt from the person who checks your cart to make sure you didn't slip an extra block of Tillamook cheese in there that you "forgot" to scan. I've personally found the Scan & Go to be wildly helpful when you want to not have to talk to another human for the entirety of your shopping trip.

However, other people have reported some inconsistencies with Scan & Go that are worth noting. For example, one Redditor says that the price on the shelf doesn't always match the price that pops up after you've scanned the item. This particular person also said they just ate the difference, since sorting it out would have required calling the manager and probably a whole lot of hemming and hawing. Long story short, pay attention to the prices that appear in the app and make sure they're the same as the promised prices.

That's sort of low-level villain stuff, but other shoppers report worse experiences, like this Facebook user who said their entire paid-for cart came up as not paid upon exit.

A warehouse store may seem like a good place to buy gift cards en masse, but Sam's Club's gift card department doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation. The general consensus — at up to and surpassing a 2019 class action lawsuit — is that buying gift cards from Sam's Club can be an expensive mistake, and one that isn't easily remedied.

The lead plaintiff in the 2019 case said he spent $289.96 on two Disney gift cards and another $500 on an American Express gift card, only to discover that the amounts were never loaded onto the cards. That's an awful lot of money to spend on a couple of pieces of plastic, and though he did eventually get his money back, it gets worse. The customer then paid another $700 for replacement cards and somehow walked out without them. When he returned, Sam's Club shrugged its corporate shoulders and pretended its hands were tied.

Apparently, the problem is still ongoing, so it's not like the company seemed to correct the problem it was literally sued over. According to a recent Reddit post, people are still buying invalid gift cards from Sam's Club, and Sam's Club is still refusing to provide refunds for those invalid gift cards. One Redditor says they weren't allowed to talk to the manager and were also given an invalid email address to send a complaint. Maybe best to just steer clear of the gift card section at Sam's for now — and perhaps forever.

My local Sam's usually has decent-looking produce and meats, but buying spoiled food at Sam's Club is a common enough experience that there was a class action lawsuit brought against it back in 2018, which the club settled to the tune of $6 million. That basically amounts to one $10 Sam's Club gift card per person (without glitches, let's hope).

The plaintiffs accused Sam's of not honoring its promise to refund spoiled "fresh" produce at 200% (Incidentally, Sam's no longer seems to promise this 200% refund, go figure).

It's hard to say if the lawsuit influenced Sam's to be more diligent about food quality. A Redditor says they got sick from Sam's Club frozen salmon, and as recently as 2025, one person complained to Consumer Affairs about bloody rotisserie chicken. Another complained about spoiled king crab that might not have actually been real king crab.

Maybe not always Sam's fault directly — another Redditor posted an image of a pack of fresh hamburger patties abandoned on a stack of canned chicken with the words, "Why can't y'all put stuff back?" Let's face it: if some well-meaning person came along and put that back in the meat section without knowing exactly how long it had been sitting there ... well, E. coli, anyone?

Everyone loves a friendly phone call from "Spam Risk," right? No? Me neither. Fortunately, my phone has a handy little "hanging up on you" button, so I don't ever have to actually talk to Spam Risk. There is no such device that can help you turn off the mouths of the aggressive salespeople populating the Sam's Club kiosks.

Sam's Club used to host different cell phone carrier kiosks, but in 2024, it announced an exclusive partnership with T-Mobile. Now, there's just one cell phone carrier officially hassling you the second you walk through the door.

In an older Reddit post, a shopper complained that the sales pitches weren't just limited to the cell phone carrier kiosk: "not even a few feet after that there's a new stand on the cleaning supply aisle that tries to flag you down for something, then you get by the water and there's someone trying to sell you filters and then you go to the checkout and there is someone trying to sell you credit cards."

The level of hassling does depend somewhat on your particular store and the management in charge of the kiosks. In another Reddit post, some customers said they're never bothered by T-Mobile reps, while others said the reps are extremely aggressive. If you're not sure, it does seem good practice to put your headphones on and stare straight ahead — or, as one Redditor suggested, say you work for Verizon "and keep walking."

I use Scan & Go because Sam's has kind of turned it into a sanity-preserving necessity for a lot of insidious reasons. The first is because I suspect the company may be deliberately under-staffing in order to save on labor costs. This means you might feel guilty whenever you skip the ridiculously long lines and use Scan & Go.

However, Scan & Go is good for more than just getting you out of the store faster and making you feel guilty. It also helps you avoid being hounded at checkout by employees trying to sell you credit cards and/or a membership upgrade. I actually fell for the latter once, and it basically amounted to spending extra money on nothing. Here are the "perks:" for an extra $60 a year, you get 2% back on "eligible purchases," plus some other benefits you might not use, like early shopping hours, free shipping on online orders, and free curbside pickup.

Assuming you don't really do curbside or online shopping, you might have to spend about $3,000 a year on eligible items to get your $60 back. Now, some people do spend that much — but I maybe spend $150 to $200 a month at Sam's, so I'm not in that category. Not every purchase is eligible, either, so you can't earn cash back on your discounted gas, booze, clearance items, or the T-Mobile cell phone service you just got talked into signing up for.