Summer’s ICEE Guide: Sam’s Club


Sam’s Club is a fairly well-known warehouse club that generally is “for members” only.  While focused on businesses, anyone can get a membership.  Even better, for local ICEE fans, they got rid of their requirement to show your member card just to get in the door a few years ago, so you can easily just pop in and get an ICEE without being a member!  Soon as you go in, turn to the left and you’ll see their small café area where you can get hot dogs, pizza, fountain drinks, and ICEE.

Location

1405 Earl Rudder FWY S, College Station (map)

Sizes & Costs

Sam’s only does one size, a large, but for the price, I have no complaints about that at all!

Small N/A
Medium N/A
Large $1.29

Flavors

Sam’s has a three flavor machine and generally stocks the three most popular ICEE flavors: Coke, Wild Cherry, and Blue Raspberry.  They will occasionally change out one flavor for one of the ICEE limited time seasonal ones, like lemonade, but most of the time they stick to the classics.

I should note, though, that their newest signs showing their ICEE prices only mention the Wild Cherry and Blue Raspberry, so they may be phasing out the Coke.  I’ll be keeping an eye out, just in case and will update this post accordingly if they do.

Quality

Sam’s is about the only place in Bryan-College Station that seems to have come close to having perfected the art of keeping their ICEE machine’s well-tuned.  I can’t think of a single time where I’ve gone there and gotten a less than perfect ICEE.  Never too thin, too carbonated, or too thick!  Their machine is also only rarely down (though of course it does do the normal de-frost cycles).

Sam’s doesn’t offer up official ICEE cups, instead it’s the same big 32 ounce Styrofoam cups they use for their fountain drinks.  So no domed lid either, but with that price, I can live with the non-standard cup, and with our Texas heat, the cup actually helps slow the melting time a bit so you don’t end up losing an inch of ICEE just walking back to your car!  They also don’t do the official ICEE straws, but their regular drinking straws are big enough to be about the same size, they are just missing the scoop.