For a year, the Costco-at-Ingleside talk lived where all good Charleston development rumors live: in Facebook comment sections and parking-lot conversations. Now it lives in a 74-page filing with the state.
Costco Wholesale submitted a site plan on June 30 for a third Lowcountry warehouse, this one off Interstate 26 near the new Weber Boulevard offramp in North Charleston. The documents spell out a 181,000-square-foot building and a 32-pump gas station on roughly 25 acres at 9000 Blue House Road. It would be the chain's eighth store in South Carolina.
If you floated the Ingleside theory last summer, congratulations. You were right. Preliminary engineering documents leaked onto social media around this time in 2025, and a company spokesperson gave the classic non-answer: Costco doesn't comment on new stores until they're two or three months from opening. The permit is the tell.
Location matters here. The West Ashley and Mount Pleasant warehouses anchor the region's established ends. Ingleside points the membership card straight up the I-26 growth corridor, toward Goose Creek, Cane Bay and the Summerville sprawl, where the rooftops are multiplying fastest. It's a bet on where Charleston is going, not where it's been.
There's a little poetry in the parcel, too. The wooded tract was once slated to become a Bass Pro Shops, a deal that never materialized. Ingleside itself is a 1,500-acre mixed-use development that's been in the works since around 2008, blending commercial space, hotels, townhomes and apartments. Daniel Island-based Weber USA Corp. is the developer, and it declined to comment.
The competitive picture is worth watching. A third Costco would square off against Sam's Club at Tanger Outlets and BJ's Wholesale Club in Summerville, tightening the bulk-buying arms race in the exact stretch of the region adding the most families.
And Costco isn't shopping alone. Home Depot recently bought land in Summerville for a future store, and Walmart is planning a full-size Supercenter along Highway 176 near Cane Bay. The big boxes are following the moving vans up 26, and the moving vans aren't slowing down.
No opening date yet. That's the point of Costco's two-to-three-month rule. But the filing is the closest thing to a confirmation the chain ever gives before the concrete trucks show up.
For the North Charleston and Summerville-corridor crowd, it's a shorter drive to the $1.50 hot dog. For everyone else, it's one more data point in the same story Charleston keeps telling itself: the region is growing faster than its retail can keep up, and the retail is racing to catch it.
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