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.
Last updated August 21, 2026. I said I'd update this as more became public. Two things have.
- August 21, 2026 — The preliminary plat was approved at the April 28 Planning Commission meeting. Separately, a Maury County deed filing rules out the one alternative tenant that made this a genuinely open question. Both below.
- April 22, 2026 — First published, from the preliminary plat filed for the April 28, 2026 Planning Commission agenda.
Update: the plat was approved
The Thompson's Station Planning Commission approved the Hatcher Cotton preliminary plat on April 28, 2026, clearing the 46.66-acre site at 4521 Columbia Pike to be divided into five commercial lots. Louis Sloane of T Square Engineering presented it, describing three access points onto Columbia Pike preserved "for flexibility."
Read the approval carefully, though, because it is narrower than it sounds. The commission treated the plat as non-discretionary — a preliminary plat that meets the town's standards has to be approved, and the commission does not get to weigh in on whether it likes the tenant. Staff recommended approval with contingencies.
Three limits came with it:
- The plat does not vest specific users. Nothing about this approval commits the site to Costco, or to any named retailer.
- Final access locations are not locked in either, and each of the five lots still needs its own site plan approval.
- Traffic signals and off-site road improvements are subject to TDOT review, which the commission stressed repeatedly. That was the open question in the original filing and it is still open.
So the project cleared its first formal gate, but the gate was a low one. The filings that would actually name the tenant — the individual site plan for the big lot, and the road-improvement agreement — are still ahead.
Update: it is not Sam's Club
The original version of this post argued the tenant was Costco or Sam's Club, and that Sam's looked likely to land somewhere else in the area. That is now a matter of public record rather than inference.
On February 3, 2026, a warranty deed recorded in Maury County (instrument R3126-285) conveyed Lot 13 of Legacy Pointe in Spring Hill from Spring Hill Holdings LLC to Sam's Real Estate Business Trust — Walmart's property-holding entity for Sam's Club — along with a companion easement (R3126-291) and agreement (R3126-335). Spring Hill Mayor Matt Fitterer published the county's deed index the same day, noting there was "still no official word on who will be the end user of the new Wholesale Club in Legacy Pointe," but that Sam's Real Estate Business Trust had bought the lot.
That Legacy Pointe building had already been approved by Spring Hill's Planning Commission on December 8, 2025 — roughly 166,740 square feet with a canopy over twelve fuel dispensers, and a condition requiring the applicant to screen the "bale and pallet area" and the "battery storage area." Warehouse-club fingerprints, eleven miles up the road.
Which matters here for one reason: Sam's is spoken for. Sam's Club does not build two clubs eleven miles apart, so the "discount shopping club" use category at Hatcher Cotton no longer has a plausible second occupant. Of the three U.S. warehouse clubs, BJ's prototype is far too small at roughly 109,000 square feet. That leaves Costco.
Still no official confirmation from Costco, four months after the approval.
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.
Hatcher Cotton preliminary plat — site plan filed with the Town of Thompson's Station, showing the 46.66-acre commercial subdivision at 4521 Columbia Pike just south of I-840.
"Discount shopping club" means Costco or Sam's — and Sam's is 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. Sam's Club is committed to a separate site at Legacy Pointe in Spring Hill — confirmed by a February 2026 deed filing, as described in the update above. Sam's does not build two clubs eleven miles apart, so it is not also doing Hatcher Cotton. That leaves Costco.
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. The preliminary plat is approved, but it was the first and lowest gate — and expressly does not vest a tenant. Site Plan, Construction Documents, and a Development Agreement all still come after it, and 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 cleared the first of those on April 28, 2026. Site Plan, Construction Documents, and a Development Agreement all still come after it.
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 keep updating this post as more becomes public. If you have information on the anchor tenant — a site plan, a road-improvement agreement, a contractor notice — get in touch.
Sources
- Hatcher Cotton Preliminary Plat Staff Report, Thompson's Station Planning Commission, April 28, 2026 (Item 4), and the commission's April 28, 2026 approval of the plat.
- Maury County Register of Deeds, instruments R3126-285 (warranty deed), R3126-291 (easement) and R3126-335 (agreement), all recorded February 3, 2026; deed index published by Spring Hill Mayor Matt Fitterer.
- City of Spring Hill Planning Commission, PDF 1969-2025 (Legacy Pointe heavy retail building), approved December 8, 2025.
- Thompson's Station — Current Developments
- TDOT Columbia Pike (Hwy 31) Widening
- Costco — New Warehouse Locations