A customer walks in the parking lot outside a Costco store on December 2, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson | Getty Images
costco Sales on Thursday beat Wall Street’s quarterly expectations, posting 8.2% year-over-year sales growth as the retailer captured more digital sales and opened new stores.
Warehouse Club did not share its full-year outlook.
On the company’s earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Gary Millerchip said e-commerce growth was one of the company’s strengths this quarter. Digital sales increased 20.5% year over year. Website traffic increased 24% year over year, and app traffic jumped 48%. We offer same-day delivery service instacart with the US Uber and door dash Internationally, it grew faster than overall digital sales.
Costco also got off to a strong start in the busiest weeks of the holiday season. Millerchip said Black Friday was a record day for Warehouse Club’s U.S. e-commerce business, with more than $250 million in non-food orders.
Here’s how Costco’s fiscal first-quarter results compare to Wall Street expectations, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG.
Earnings per share: $4.50 vs. $4.27 expected Revenue: $67.31 billion vs. $67.14 billion expected
Costco is gaining new members and increasing sales in clubs and online as U.S. consumers of all incomes seek value when shopping for groceries, household goods, holiday gifts and more.
Like its warehouse club competitors, Costco attracts younger customers who sign up for memberships. Costco is also benefiting from membership fee increases in the U.S. and Canada that took effect in September 2024, with price hikes starting as new members sign up and existing customers renew their annual memberships when they expire.
Costco’s net income for the three months ended Nov. 23 rose to $2.0 billion, or $4.50 per share, from $1.8 billion, or $4.04 per share, a year earlier. Revenue increased to $67.31 billion from $62.15 billion in the same period last year.
Comparable sales, an industry measure that excludes the impact of one-time factors such as store openings and closings, rose 5.9% in the U.S. and 6.4% worldwide.
Millerchip said non-food sales grew by double digits year over year, led by pharmacies, gold and jewelry, tires, small appliances and clothing.
Costco CEO Ron Vacris said on an earnings call that Costco opened eight new warehouse clubs in the first quarter, including a move in Canada, a third store in France, four new stores in the United States and the addition of two business centers in Canada. Business centers tend to sell large quantities of merchandise to restaurants and other types of businesses. These additional stores bring the total number of stores worldwide to 921.
He said the company plans to continue opening more than 30 clubs a year.
Costco, a warehouse club, relies on membership fees to increase revenue and keep product prices low. But retailers have been dealing with higher costs due to higher tariffs. About a third of Costco’s U.S. sales come from imported products.
Millerchip said inflation was “relatively consistent with recent quarters.” In the grocery sector, he said Costco saw higher inflation for items such as beef, seafood and coffee, but this was offset by lower inflation for eggs, cheese, butter and produce.
In the non-food sector, Costco’s inflation rate was in the low single digits for the third straight quarter, driven primarily by gold and imports, he said.
Millerchip said on the earnings call that Costco has been looking for ways to reduce the impact of the tariffs, including sourcing more products from the U.S., consolidating purchases around the world to lower product costs and switching categories and items to ones that aren’t as exposed to high tariffs.
The company’s private label, Kirkland Signature, is another way to offset tariff prices because it has more control over the supply chain, he said.
Costco filed a lawsuit in late November asking the Trump administration to refund all new tariffs it has paid so far this year and to block the company from collecting import duties pending a Supreme Court ruling on the tariffs.
At the end of the quarter, Costco’s total number of paying members rose 5.2% year over year to 81.4 million, and the number of cardholders rose 5.1% year over year to 145.9 million, Millerchip said. Renewal rates in the United States and Canada were 92.2% and 89.7% worldwide, a slight decline as more customers signed up for memberships online, resulting in a slightly lower renewal rate for those members.
As of Thursday’s close, Costco’s stock price was down nearly 4% since the beginning of the year. This is lower than the S&P 500’s 17% rise over the same period. However, over the past five years, Costco’s stock price has increased by 141%. The company’s stock closed Thursday at $884.48, giving it a market capitalization of $392.67 billion.
