One Friday morning in April, a newly appointed CEO stood in a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, staring at a wall of fruit cups. Mangoes, peaches, pineapples, mandarin oranges, variety packs, and more peaches — stacked 15 high, filling half an aisle. She snapped a photo and sent it to her chief merchant with a simple question: "How many fruit cups do you need to sell in one club?"
Latriece Watkins was just 12 weeks into her job as CEO of Sam's Club, the $96 billion membership-based warehouse retailer owned by Walmart. The fruit cup moment might sound like a small operational detail — and for most CEOs it would be. But Watkins isn't most CEOs. As Walmart's former chief merchant, she was responsible for choosing the $500 billion worth of products Walmart sells every year, which made her one of the most powerful buyers in global retail. When she looks at a wall of too many fruit cups, she's not being fussy. She's diagnosing a business problem: too many choices paralyse customers, inflate costs, and dilute what makes a membership retailer worth joining in the first place.
But the fruit cups aren't really the story. The story is the number: $96 billion. If Sam's Club were a standalone company on the Fortune 500, it would sit at No. 43 — above Tesla and below Target. Watkins is running a business ten times the size of what some Fortune 500 CEOs are running. And yet, if you asked the average person on the street to name the most powerful retail executives in America, very few would say her name. Sam's Club — a chain that's been operating for over four decades, serving tens of millions of members — is one of the most consequential businesses in the country that almost nobody talks about.
That invisibility is the real puzzle. And unpacking it tells you something important not just about Sam's Club, but about how we measure business success, where the next generation of great companies might be hiding, and what it takes to lead something significant when the spotlight is pointing somewhere else.
