Customers walk in the parking lot in front of a Costco store on December 2, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson | Getty Images
Costco Thursday beat Wall Street’s quarterly expectations and reported 8.2% year-over-year sales growth as the retailer attracted more digital sales and opened new locations.
The warehouse club does not share an outlook for the full year.
When announcing the company’s results, Chief Financial Officer Gary Millerchip said e-commerce gains were one of the quarter’s highlights. Digital sales jumped 20.5% year-on-year. Traffic to its website increased 24% year over year and traffic to its app climbed 48%. Same day delivery service offered via Instacart in the United States and Uber And PorteDash Internationally, sales grew at a faster rate than overall digital sales.
Costco also had a positive start to the busiest weeks of the holiday season. Millerchip said Black Friday was a record day for the warehouse club’s e-commerce business in the United States, generating more than $250 million in non-food orders.
Here’s how Costco performed in its fiscal first quarter compared to what Wall Street expected, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: $4.50 versus $4.27 expected
- Income: $67.31 billion versus $67.14 billion expected
Costco has attracted new members and higher sales at its clubs and online, as U.S. consumers, regardless of income, look for value when shopping, household essentials, holiday gifts and more.
Alongside its warehouse club competitors, Costco has gained traction with younger customers signing up for membership. Costco also benefited from a membership fee increase in the United States and Canada, which took effect in September 2024 and was applied when new members signed up or when existing customers renewed their annual membership when it expired.
In the three months ended Nov. 23, Costco’s net income rose to $2 billion, or $4.50 per share, compared with $1.80 billion, or $4.04 per share, in the year-earlier quarter. Revenue increased to $67.31 billion from $62.15 billion in the same quarter last year.
Comparable sales, an industry measure that excludes the impact of one-time factors such as store openings and closings, increased 5.9% in the United States and 6.4% globally.
Sales in the non-food sector were led by pharmaceuticals, gold and jewelry, tires, small electrical appliances and clothing, which saw double-digit year-on-year growth, Millerchip said.
In the first quarter, Costco opened eight new warehouse clubs, including a move to Canada, its third location in France, four new locations in the United States and two additional business centers in Canada, CEO Ron Vachris said during the company’s earnings conference call. Business centers tend to sell bulk items intended for restaurants and other types of businesses. These additional locations bring the total number of stores to 921 worldwide.
He said the company plans to continue opening 30 or more clubs per year in the coming years.
As a warehouse club, Costco relies on membership dues to increase its revenue and help keep the prices of its items low. However, with higher tariffs, the retailer faced increased costs. About a third of Costco’s U.S. sales come from imported products.
Inflation “has remained relatively consistent compared to recent quarters,” Millerchip said. He said that in the grocery sector, Costco saw higher inflation in products such as beef, seafood and coffee, but that was offset by lower inflation in eggs, cheese, butter and produce.
In the non-food sector, he said Costco reported low single-digit inflation for the third consecutive quarter, driven mainly by gold and imported goods.
Millerchip said during the earnings conference call that Costco has been looking at ways to reduce the impact of tariffs, including sourcing more items from the United States, consolidating purchases across the world to reduce the cost of goods and substituting categories or items with those that are not as exposed to high tariff costs.
Its private label, Kirkland Signature, is another way to offset tariff prices because it has more control over the supply chain, he said.
In late November, Costco sued the Trump administration for a full refund of the new tariffs it has paid so far this year and to prevent those import duties from being collected from the company pending a Supreme Court ruling on the duties.
At the end of the quarter, Costco had 81.4 million total paying members, up 5.2% year over year, and 145.9 million cardholders, up 5.1% year over year, Millerchip said. Its renewal rate in the United States and Canada was 92.2% and its global rate was 89.7%, declining slightly as more customers sign up online and those members renew at a slightly lower rate.
As of Thursday’s close, Costco shares are down nearly 4% year to date. This figure is lower than the S&P 500’s 17% gains during the same period. However, over the past five years, Costco shares have surged 141%. The company’s stock closed at $884.48 on Thursday, bringing its market value to $392.67 billion.