New Kelowna Costco warehouse to open in February

It's looking like it will take less than a year from the time it was approved by the city for Costco to open its new Kelowna warehouse.

The company had planned to open its 24-pump gas bar next week but that's not going to happen just yet.

“We were hoping to open the Kelowna gas station in the second week of December but this has been postponed to later,” Martin Groleau, vice-president for e-commerce for Costco, said in an email to iNFOnews.ca today, Dec. 7.

Groleau said they don't have a specific opening date for the gas bar, but added it will likely be later in December or next January. The plan is to open the warehouse store in February but there isn't a specific date scheduled for that either.

READ MORE: Costco’s rumoured move to West Kelowna takes Kelowna mayor by surprise

The opening of the new warehouse will mark the culmination of years of speculation that Costco was going to expand and relocate. There were even rumours, back in 2019, that it would move to West Kelowna because no suitable land was available in Kelowna.

That proved not to be the case as Costco filed an application with the City of Kelowna in November 2020 to rezone a 14.75 acre parcel bounded by Springfield, Leckie and Baron roads.

The building will replace the existing store that opened in 1991 at the corner of Highways 97 and 33.

The new warehouse is 167,177 square feet versus 135,000 square feet for the old one, plus a gas bar with 24 pumps.

READ MORE:New Kelowna Costco gets final council approval but not without some controversy

It will add 50 to 60 new staff, about half of them full-time.

Currently, Costco employs almost 450 people with more than 55 per cent of those being full-time, a Costco representative told city council in April.

A development permit was approved at that meeting, despite some vocal opposition. A February opening of the new warehouse will be less than 12 months after Costco got final approval.


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Rob Munro

Rob Munro has a long history in journalism after starting an underground newspaper in Whitehorse called the Yukon Howl in 1980. He spent five years at the 100 Mile Free Press, starting in the darkroom, moving on to sports and news reporting before becoming the advertising manager. He came to Kelowna in 1989 as a reporter for the Kelowna Daily Courier, and spent the 1990s mostly covering city hall. For most of the past 20 years he worked full time for the union representing newspaper workers throughout B.C. He’s returned to his true love of being a reporter with a special focus on civic politics

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