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CLAIM #16924 · Costco Wholesale Corp (COST) · 2026Q2 earnings call · Mar 5, 2026 · due Aug 30, 2026

As far as the new openings coming up, it won't have a negative effect on our membership.

Ron Vachris · CEO

PENDING
graded after results covering Aug 30, 2026 are reported

How to check this claim

Look at: Total paid membership count (or membership growth rate), company-reported

It came true if: Year-over-year paid membership growth remains positive (>= 0%) through the period following new club openings

Where: Company-disclosed membership figures (quarterly earnings release / 10-Q/10-K membership metrics)

In context

gas. And so when prices are higher, that will tend to cause members to maybe take the extra mile that it might be involved to get to the gas station because of the incremental value they see there. But obviously, we'll have to see what happens with gas prices over the coming months there. Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley. Simeon Gutman: I have 2 unrelated questions. First, the competitive openings are stepping up this year. I imagine there's maybe some membership impact in nearby openings from competitors. Is there anything above and beyond? And then the second part is if a customer speaks to an LLM, how do you show up or how do you want to show up? And are you seeing any opportunities to convert members? Ron Vachris: You're welcome. As far as the new openings coming up, it won't have a negative effect on our membership. We won't see those big swells of new markets that we would see when you go into an existing building. So it balances that out. It really drives our sales with frequency and visits. As we relieve a high-volume warehouse, those tend to build back very quickly. And so we may not see the traditional number of new members, but frequency of members and those type of things start really ramping up in those markets as we see. So we don't see a negative effect, but we don't see the big tailwind we saw with new sign-ups as we would in the new market as well. And for the LLM, I'll take a shot at that. The biggest thing we feel with our quality and our value is we want to show up everywhere we can and everywhere we can. And we want to make sure that Costco is surfacing with all these partners that we

Verify independently

SEC filings for COST · Claim quote is verbatim from the 2026Q2 earnings call.