22 Costco Stores Now Offer EV Charging — With More To Come

The electric vehicle market has been growing rapidly in recent years, and it appears Costco wants to keep up with that trend.

EV charging stations are beginning to pop up at Costco locations.

Costco did not respond to Money Talks News’ request for comment, but here’s what we found.

Costco installed EV chargers at numerous locations early on. By 2006, 64 warehouses had 90 chargers in total, according to a New York Times report. But the retailer removed its charging stations around the early 2010s, citing disuse.

“We were early supporters of electric cars, going back as far as 15 years. But nobody ever uses them,” a general manager for Costco in Northern California told the Times in 2011. “At our Folsom store, the manager said he hadn’t seen anybody using the EV charging in a full year. At our store in Vacaville, where we had six chargers, one person plugged in once a week.”

More than a decade later, Costco’s chief financial officer, Richard Galanti, was asked what the push to EVs will mean for Costco’s profitable gasoline business, especially in California — which now has more Costco locations than any other state by far, with 135 warehouses.

Galanti likened the situation to Costco’s carwash business, which has “plenty of room” to grow, he said on the company’s quarterly earnings call in March 2023. (Currently, only about 15 warehouses have a carwash.)

Galanti then deferred the EV question:

“Yeah. It’s a long road ahead. At some point, we only have 11 car washes. So we have plenty of room for carwashes 30 years from now. But at the end of the day, we think it’s a very long road. It’s not happening in the next few years. And the fact that we’re still taking such market share relative to U.S. gas gallons in general is a positive. So it’s a question, but not — I think it’s a question that we can defer for five or 10 years, frankly.”

Whatever Costco’s EV plan was then, it appears to have changed since.

Members in McDonough, Georgia, have noticed and made use of new charging stations in recent months. And this development doesn’t stop in Georgia. At least 22 Costco parking lots now have EV charging stations, according to our research.

They include the following warehouses, as confirmed by Costco’s website or PlugShare, an app with crowd-sourced details on public charging stations worldwide.

Incidentally, many of these locations are in California. A few are relatively new warehouses, opened in the past year, which might explain why they have EV charging stations. However, others have been around since as far back as the 1980s.

These warehouses are listed by their name per Costco’s site, with the city listed afterward if the city is not the same as the warehouse name:

1. Azusa (California)
2. Chino Hills (California)
3. Eastvale (California)
4. Los Feliz (Los Angeles, California)
5. Monterey Park (California)
6. Rancho Cordova (California)
7. San Bernardino (California)
8. San Francisco (California)
9. Simi Valley (California)
10. Torrance (California)
11. Tustin Ranch (Tustin, California)
12. Ukiah (California)
13. Westlake Village (California)
14. NE Denver (Colorado) — new location opened in July 2023
15. Clermont (Florida) — new location opened in November 2023
16. Iwilei (Honolulu, Hawaii)
17. Kauai (Lihue, Hawaii)
18. Kapolei (Hawaii)
19. Maui (Kahului, Hawaii)
20. Salt Lake City (Utah)
21. Stockbridge (McDonough, Georgia) — new location opened in November 2023
22. St. Louis Park (Minnesota)

Even a parking garage at Costco’s headquarters in Issaquah, Washington, has chargers, although PlugShare reports that they are for use by employees only.

Additionally, a forthcoming Costco location slated to be built in the town of Guilderland, New York, will have eight EV charging stations, according to a May 2023 report in local newspaper The Altamont Enterprise.

Costco even offers its highest cash-back rate — up to 4% — to Costco Anywhere Visa cardholders who charge their EVs at Costco. This is the same cash-back rate cardholders earn when buying gasoline at Costco, but it’s not available for any other types of purchases.

If there’s no Costco EV charging station near you yet, or if you’d simply like to set up a station at your own at home, Costco sells chargers for electric vehicles.

Level one chargers are the more basic version and plug into standard 120-volt outlets. However, Costco sells level two chargers, which are faster and need a 240-volt outlet.