Budget and bulk shoppers in South Texas will soon find some new options to snack on as they load their carts with ginormous packs of toilet paper and bottled water.
The food court inside the Costco Wholesale store located in Pharr in the Rio Grande Valley is about to undergo a $200,000 refresh, according to Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation records, which are subject to change.
The store, which first opened in 2013 and anchors Pharr’s busy retail corridor along Interstate 2 near the I-2/Interstate 69 interchange, is the only Costco in the Valley. Some 1,278 square feet of the store’s interior will be renovated to improve the food court, including remodeling and replacing equipment, fixtures and finishes, according to state records. The industrial kitchen’s warewash line — a type of conveyor-style dishwashing system —will also be removed and replaced.
The renovation project is slated to begin in September and be completed by next March, TDLR records show.
Though news of on-again, off-again tariffs has sent much of the U.S. economy into turmoil, Costco has been enjoying a period of relative prosperity. In an earnings report Costco released on Wednesday, June 4, the company reported net sales of more than $20 billion for May 2025 — a 6.8% increase from the same period of 2024. The company’s sales have been on an upward trend for the last year.
“Net sales in the first 39 weeks were $201.02 billion, an increase of 8.0 percent from the $186.07 billion last year,” the company stated in a news release.
Within just a couple of years after opening, its presence attracted scores of new businesses to Pharr’s west side, including a Chick-Fil-A, a Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers, and more. The constellation of new businesses and restaurants that followed Costco to Pharr represented about a $15 million investment in the city, Pharr officials said in 2015.
“Good development follows good development,” Pharr’s then-City Manager Fred Sandoval said in an October 2019 news release.
Other big box stores soon chose to locate within 1 mile of the Costco, including the first Home Depot and Lowe’s to be built in the Valley, according to a report by the Rio Grande Guardian. In the just the latest sign of the area’s economic vitality, Swedish home furnishing store, IKEA, announced it was building a small-format store at the Pharr Town Center, once the site of the El Centro Mall.
Costco, which is headquartered in Washington state, operates 905 warehouses in 14 countries, including 624 in the United States and Puerto Rico.