Is Costco Coming to Thompson's Station, TN?

A new planning document filed with the Town of Thompson's Station describes a 165,890 square foot "discount shopping club" on Columbia Pike, just south of I-840. It's Item 4 on the April 28, 2026 Planning Commission agenda. No tenant is named in the public filing.

But the footprint, the corridor, and the timing all point at Costco.

No retailer has gone on record, and this plat could still die at a later stage. But the evidence is unusually specific, and if you live in Spring Hill, Thompson's Station, or Columbia, this is the project to watch.

What's actually in the filing

The project is called Hatcher Cotton. The address is 4521 Columbia Pike, Thompson's Station, TN 37179. The applicant wants to subdivide 46.66 acres into five commercial/retail lots with three new accesses on Columbia Pike.

Here's the proposed mix from the staff report:

• Free-standing emergency room, ~18,000 SF
• General retail plaza, ~78,000 SF
• Discount shopping club, ~165,890 SF
• Multiple fast-casual and fast-food restaurants with drive-thrus

That 165,890 SF anchor is what this whole post is about.

"Discount shopping club" means Costco or Sam's — and Sam's is probably elsewhere

In commercial real estate filings, "discount shopping club" is a use category, not a brand. It covers exactly three retailers: Costco, Sam's Club, and BJ's Wholesale. BJ's has been expanding aggressively in middle Tennessee — three Nashville-metro clubs (La Vergne, Mt. Juliet, Goodlettsville) opened between June 2023 and February 2024 — but its prototype runs ~109,000 SF, far smaller than the 165,890 SF in this filing. So realistically it's Costco or Sam's.

Here's where it gets easier to narrow down. There's strong indication Sam's Club is planning a separate store on the south side of Spring Hill — different developer, different corridor, different timeline. I'll write that one up separately as it firms up. But if Sam's is committed to a south-side site, it's not also doing Hatcher Cotton two miles north on the same Columbia Pike corridor. Sam's doesn't cannibalize itself that way.

That leaves Costco.

The square footage is the tell

Compare the prototype footprints of the three U.S. warehouse clubs:

• Costco's current prototype runs roughly 160,000–165,000 SF for the warehouse itself, with newer builds trending toward the upper end to accommodate the expanded food court, pharmacy, optical, and hearing aid centers.
• Sam's Club runs closer to 136,000 SF on average. Its largest formats top out in the low 150s.
• BJ's is ~109,000 SF — too small to match this filing on size alone, regardless of how aggressively they're expanding the TN footprint.

165,890 SF isn't a Sam's Club number. It's a Costco number.

Developers don't pick round numbers for plat filings. The footprint gets pulled directly from the tenant's real estate committee prototype. The fact that the filing says 165,890 — not 160,000, not 170,000 — tells you a specific tenant's site requirements are already driving the plan.

Why this site fits Costco's playbook

Costco's site selection criteria are fairly well documented. The real estate committee looks for:

• 25–30 acres minimum for the warehouse, parking, fuel, tire bays, and outparcels. Hatcher Cotton's 46.66 acres clears this easily, with the remainder going to the ER, retail plaza, and restaurant pads.
• Interstate visibility and access. The site sits just south of I-840 on Columbia Pike, with I-65 about three miles east via Saturn Parkway.
• High household income in the primary trade area. The one-mile radius around this parcel clears $114,000 median household income. Williamson County has the highest median income in Tennessee.
• Dense, growing population with no nearby warehouse club. That's this corridor, exactly.

Then there's the traffic engineering. The Traffic Impact Study filed with the plat calls for new signals at all three site accesses on Columbia Pike, plus right-turn lanes and striping work at seven additional intersections along the corridor. You don't engineer that kind of mitigation for a 78,000 SF neighborhood retail plaza and an urgent care. You engineer it for an anchor that's going to generate Saturday-morning Costco volume.

The market gap is real — and anyone who shops the Brentwood store already knows it

The nearest Costco today is in Brentwood, at Cool Springs. From Spring Hill it's roughly 25–30 minutes off-peak and materially worse on a weekend.

My Opinion: The Cool Springs Costco is packed. Parking-lot-chaos packed. Turn-around-and-go-home-because-the-lot-is-full packed. I've watched people give up on a Saturday morning and just drive away. If you live on the south side of Franklin or anywhere in Spring Hill, Thompson's Station, Columbia, or Maury County, you already know this. The demand for a second middle-Tennessee store pulling from the southern catchment is very obviously there — and from everything I've seen, it's been there for years.

Any Costco real estate executive looking at a map of the Brentwood store's trade area is staring at a massive under-served pocket to the south: the entire Columbia Pike / US-31 spine, Spring Hill proper, Thompson's Station, and Columbia. This is the fastest-growing corridor in middle Tennessee, and it has no warehouse club of any kind.

Costco is in expansion mode, and Tennessee is a light target

Costco planned 28 new warehouse openings for its fiscal year 2026. Only 7 have been publicly announced so far, which leaves 21 unannounced store locations still in the pipeline.

Tennessee has 9 Costco stores today. For a state of 7.2 million people with the kind of population and income growth middle Tennessee has posted over the last decade, that number is low. The corridor between Franklin and Columbia alone has added tens of thousands of high-income households since the last middle-TN store opened.

If you were picking the next announcement, you'd pick a site that bolts directly onto an interstate, sits in the highest-income county in the state, and covers a catchment that currently has to drive 25 minutes to a warehouse club that's already over capacity.

That describes this site.

The corridor is going fully commercial

Hatcher Cotton isn't a one-off. The Columbia Pike corridor between I-840 and downtown Thompson's Station is filling up with commercial development. The pieces only line up if a major anchor is coming.

• Shoppes at Fountain View — a 47,000 SF retail center that opened in late 2025, half a mile south of the Hatcher Cotton site.
• Columbia Pike widening — TDOT is reconstructing US-31 to four lanes from Franklin through Thompson's Station into Spring Hill. The Town got the project pulled forward from 2029 to 2026 by committing $15M in local funds. Road-widening projects at that dollar level don't get accelerated to serve a Dollar General.
• Mars Petcare Global Innovation Center — already operating adjacent to this corridor, with the daytime employee base that anchor retailers look for.

Where the argument could fall apart

• The tenant could change. A Preliminary Plat doesn't lock in a specific retailer. Costco's real estate committee can walk. The footprint is Costco-shaped, but if the deal falls through the lot could end up with a different club, a sporting goods anchor, a supermarket, or nothing.
• Offsite improvements could blow up the economics. The staff report already flags that the applicant is "requesting further discussions regarding the responsibility" of several right-turn lanes and signal upgrades. That's developer code for "we don't want to pay for that." The Town will require the developer to commit to a share of the road improvements before issuing building permits, and hard negotiations at that stage have killed plenty of commercial projects.
• The plat could stall at a later stage. Preliminary Plat is the first formal approval. Site Plan, Construction Documents, and Development Agreement all come later. Any one of them can hang a project up for months or kill it entirely.
• It could be a warehouse club I haven't considered. Unlikely — the three I listed cover the U.S. market — but a new entrant is technically possible.

Until one of those plays out, the footprint, the site, and the timing still point at Costco.

What to watch next

A commercial project this size goes through multiple public approvals, and each one usually surfaces more detail. The Preliminary Plat was filed for the April 28, 2026 Planning Commission meeting (Item 4) — the first formal step in a multi-stage approval process.

Things worth tracking, in roughly the order they tend to surface:

• Individual Site Plan filings for the lot that will hold the 165,890 SF building. A Costco prototype site plan is recognizable on sight — the angled warehouse orientation, the detached fuel station layout, the tire bay configuration. That filing will make the tenant obvious even if the name is still redacted.
• Tennessee Secretary of State filings naming Costco. Costco usually registers in a state before opening a store there.
• The road-improvement agreement between the developer and the Town. The developer has to commit to that before building permits get issued, and the document — once public — usually identifies the anchor.
• Town announcements and construction notices for the Highway 31 corridor. The Town's current developments page is the best running source.

The Thompson's Station Planning Commission meets the fourth Tuesday of every month at Town Hall, 1110 Fountain View Blvd. Meetings are public, and agendas and staff reports are posted on the Town's website a few days before each one.

I'll update this post as more becomes public. If you have information on this — especially on the anchor tenant or on the south-side Sam's Club site — get in touch.

---

Sources

• Hatcher Cotton Preliminary Plat Staff Report, Thompson's Station Planning Commission, April 28, 2026 (Item 4).
• Thompson's Station — Current Developments
• TDOT Columbia Pike (Hwy 31) Widening
• Costco — New Warehouse Locations