Frugal shoppers can rejoice as leaders in wholesale, Costco, have plans to expand their number of locations starting as soon as the first quarter of 2025. The American wholesale company with 897 locations spanning across the globe has announced its plans for the 2025 fiscal year in which they will expand operations with an impressive 29 new locations covering both America and globally.
Get your Costco wholesale stores in bulk
March 2025 will bring with it the opening of several new Costco stores which will result in the company surpassing a total of 900 locations worldwide. The plan is to begin with 6 new stores, four of which can be found split across Texas and California. The ever-growing company had just recently opened the doors to its 897th location on November 27, in Pleasanton. Thanks to consumers lining up outside in anticipation for the opening of new store, the pioneer in wholesale had recorded a shocking $2.9 million in sales, making it the company’s highest ever record for opening day sales.
This remarkable response likely spurred the plans for further expansion and at present, the company is set to open a total of 29 locations between now and Aug. 31, 2025 which marks the end of their fiscal year. Of these 29 locations, ten will be outside the U.S.. Twenty-six of the total locations will be new buildings, whilst the remaining three are set to be relocations. Seven new locations — four of which were outside the U.S., were opened during the first fiscal quarter in the period between Sept. 24 and Nov. 24.
Opening dates are close but how far are the locations?
With the first round of openings scheduled for March, Costco has announced the locations for six stores in the U.S.. These are the locations and scheduled opening dates:
- Brentwood, California (no scheduled date yet)
- Genesee County, Michigan (no scheduled date yet)
- Highland, California (no scheduled date yet)
- Prosper, Texas (March 14)
- Sharon, Mass (March 1)
- Weatherford, Texas (March 15)
From warehouse to home, is there a cost to cutting out the middleman?
The name Costco Wholesale implies a standard of lower, affordable pricing for bulk amounts of goods that cannot be found in other retail establishments as the norm in trading has always been to honor a discount on bulk purchases. The company’s fresh from the factory, warehouse to home business model makes them a go-to for many consumers as it works out to be more economical. Each location also has a hot food section wherein customers can enjoy a quick bite and take a break when shopping.
These amenities and the ability to shop at a Costco, however, cannot be accessed by simply walking into your nearest location. Each customer has to sign up for a membership and use their membership card to gain access. Membership comes at the recently increased annual fee of $65. The previous fee in the United States was $60 and executive memberships, as well as Canada Gold Star memberships also increased from $120 to $130. This minor increase in membership fees yielded an increase of 7.6% in revenue for the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2025. According to the company, this accounts for $1.17 billion, an increase from the previous year’s $1.08 billion. Of the 77.4 million paid memberships at Costco, almost half are executive memberships.
Unfortunately, the end of the 2024 holiday shopping period will also mark the beginning of the end of book sales at most Costco stores. The company has also begun to implement the use of scanners that members will use to scan their cards to enter certain stores. It remains to be seen if the increase in membership fees, coupled with the decision to no longer sell books will cause a downtick in the number of memberships or if the opening of the new locations will offset this.