Engineering internship led to retail career for Sam’s Club chief merchant Megan Crozier

What little kid wouldn’t want to ride around Sam’s Club on a cart? As an adult, Megan Crozier gets paid to do it.

Crozier, the company’s executive vice president and chief merchandising officer, recalls growing up in Oklahoma and tooling around with her parents on a Saturday while they shopped for her father’s small business.

“I remember going with my mom and dad to Sam’s Club,” she said. “My dad had his own consulting business; he was a small business owner. I remember going to Sam’s Club to buy supplies for his office. So I had these memories of being a little kid riding around the flatbed inside the North Sheridan [Road] Sam’s Club in Tulsa.”

Trips to Sam’s Club aren’t the only thing Crozier inherited from her father. An engineer by trade, her father’s career path rubbed off on her.

Crozier, 44, graduated from Oklahoma State University with an industrial engineering and management degree. That education path landed her an internship with Walmart in Bentonville between her junior and senior years, which led to a full-time job when she graduated. Crozier’s first job was with Walmart in Temple, Texas, doing what industrial engineers are trained to do.

“I followed order fillers around to try and make their work more ergonomic and see if we can make processes easier, simpler, more cost-efficient,” she recalled. “Ultimately, I ended up in Bentonville doing the same type of work, but I transitioned the work to our stores and did things like help our cashiers to think about the ultimate layout when they’re checking people out to become really efficient.”

BECOMING A MERCHANT
Consumed with building efficiencies and taking costs out of the supply chain, Crozier did not foresee her path to merchandising until she encountered a buyer who was making multimillion-dollar back-to-school decisions.

“I walked up to ask him a question about something else, but then asked, ‘What are you doing?’ He was planning for back-to-school and which laptop he was going to buy,” she said. “He was looking at all the competitors from the previous year trying to pick which item he wanted to put in print in the circular for the back-to-school ad. And I was like, ‘They let you do that?’ He just laughed at me and said, ‘Of course they let me do that. That’s what my job is.’

“I remember going back to my desk and thinking, ‘Wow, they let people make really big decisions in this company, and I think I want to be a merchant one day.’”

Crozier successfully applied for a job opportunity to become a Walmart buyer. She cut her teeth buying movies and transitioned into electronics, where she bought everything from boom boxes and Discmans to a hip new product that no one had ever heard of — iPods.

“I bought iPods, like the colored Nanos, when they came out,” she said. “I was the buyer for the company for that and all the accessories with it. That was by far the most fun buying category that I had. Then, I moved over to cameras and bought cameras for the company when the iPhone came out. Nobody wanted a camera anymore, and it was a really, really hard job and a really hard category.

“But I learned so much because right at the same time when that came out, the dot-com boom was starting. Walmart.com had just been ramping up, and we as a company hadn’t figured out what omni- and dot-com, multi-channel — whatever we called it — we hadn’t figured that out yet.

“So much of my business was being done online that it forced me as a merchant to start thinking in an omnichannel way before the company was probably ready for it. And I remember being on the edge and making tough choices for the company, and I loved every single bit of that.”

From movies and electronics and Apple devices, you’d naturally move a buyer into the frozen food business, right? That was Crozier’s next move; her strongest assets were her appetite for eating and learning.

“When I moved over to our food side of the business and into our frozen food business, I was like, ‘I know nothing about food. I know how to eat. That’s what I got.’ It was so fun though, to have a very different pace, a very different supplier base, a very different animal to take on,” she said.

Working under Charles Redfield’s leadership, who was then Walmart’s chief merchant, Crozier’s experience in the food division prepared her for the future. From frozen foods to dried groceries to dairy deli and bread, Crozier was helping manage the central hub of Walmart’s food business, which accounts for nearly half of its revenue.

Sixteen years into her Walmart career, she was tapped by Sam’s Club and moved into the role she’s had for the past four years.

CUSTOMERS FIRST
As chief merchant for Sam’s Club, Crozier practices the golden rule: listen to the customer.

“Any retailer you talk to says, of course, we listen to our members. But we have this very open dialogue with our members that we almost sit as equals at the table,” she said. “We engage in this feedback loop, this back-and-forth dialogue, whether around services or products or how they want to experience their club or how our associates engage with them. We want this to have the very reciprocal relationship that makes us stronger and better.”

At Sam’s Club, she oversees a lot of the customer feedback loop, which includes Zoom focus groups, ratings and reviews, and in-store conversations with shoppers. Social media is another area that Sam’s Club scours for the good, bad and ugly experiences shoppers may have.

Being a membership-driven organization, there are ways for Sam’s Club members to engage with management.

Through a “Member’s Mark community,” Crozier says over 40,000 members provide insight into products and services. They ask questions, design products, taste products and provide feedback on packaging and user-friendliness.

She added that Member’s Mark, a private label brand exclusive to Sam’s Club, increasingly is becoming a reason members renew with the retailer.

“We’ve seen growth across many categories and high member reviews on the items we’re developing,” she said. “And that’s because the Member’s Mark team has a strong focus on being member-obsessed and delivering the best quality, trend-right innovation at a disruptive value. When it comes to quality, the Member’s Mark brand aims to be the highest quality in our assortment, and our members have come to expect that of the brand. You’ll see us continue to expand Member’s Mark across the entire box.”

STRONG GROWTH
Sam’s Club has been on a tear as the COVID-19 pandemic started a significant growth spurt. Revenues for Sam’s Club are up 46% over the past five years, topping $84 billion in sales for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2023.

Crozier said the company’s strategy is right as it enters 2024. Staying focused on members and associates is critical to maintaining strong growth.

And for a kid from Oklahoma who just thought riding around on a cart in a Sam’s Club was fun, guiding the merchandise that lines the aisles of those stores where her parents shopped is a dream come true.

“I never thought I’d end up in a merchandising job, especially at the world’s largest company and being able to lead a fantastic team,” Crozier said. “It wasn’t anything I aspired to. I’m always humbled and privileged to still be doing what I do every single day.”