Costco POLITICAL

Corporate Communications & Public Stance

• Costco’s reviewed investor-relations materials and FY2025 SEC filing contain no official statement on Israel, Gaza, Palestine, civilian harm, aid, ceasefire, or a related corporate donation or logistics programme ^{1, 2}.

• A February 2024 Costco sales release lists the Ukraine conflict among generic forward-looking risk factors, but the reviewed release contains no Israel/Palestine operational announcement or position statement ².

• Costco states that it does not take positions on social issues, is not involved in partisan politics, and does not contribute money to political candidates or issues; this is a corporate representation ³.

Operations in Occupied or Contested Territories

• Costco’s FY2025 filing reports warehouses in the United States/Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom, Korea, Australia, Taiwan, China, Spain, France, Sweden, Iceland, and New Zealand, and reports e-commerce sites only in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia ¹.

• Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights are not among the operating jurisdictions listed in Costco’s FY2025 filing ¹.

• Costco’s significant-subsidiaries exhibit does not name an Israeli entity, while expressly omitting subsidiaries that would not be significant in the aggregate ⁴.

• Shamir Salads’ supplier profile states that it began marketing hummus to Costco USA in 2016 and describes exports to Costco USA in present tense ⁵.

• Who Profits identifies Costco USA as a partner/customer of Shamir Salads and states that Shamir’s principal factory is in the Barkan Industrial Zone, which it describes as a settlement in the occupied West Bank ⁶.

• The same Who Profits record states that Shamir labels and markets products abroad as “Made in Israel” ⁶.

• The supplier page and Who Profits record corroborate a reported Shamir–Costco relationship, but the supplied sources do not establish current SKU-level assortment, purchase volumes, purchase orders, customs entries, or product-level country-of-origin labelling ^{5, 6}.

• A non-official commercial registry mirror lists an active company named “Costco Kirkland Israel Ltd.”, incorporated in 2020, but the available evidence does not establish its ownership or affiliation with Costco Wholesale Corporation ^{7, 4}.

• A 2012 BDS Movement report said that a United Church of Canada campaign identified Ahava, SodaStream, and Keter products at Costco Canada and other retailers; this is historical campaign reporting rather than independently verified current assortment evidence ⁸.

• A 2010 USACBI post reproduced a response attributed to a Costco representative stating that Ahava items were pending deletion after sell-through, but it does not establish the reason for deletion, its geographic scope, or present status ⁹.

• A separate 2010 USACBI post reported boycott appeals concerning Israeli clementines and attributed to Costco a statement that sourcing rotated seasonally among Spanish, Californian, and Israeli sources; the current status of that reported sourcing is unknown ¹⁰.

• A 2024 Canadian BDS Coalition pamphlet depicts Mehadrin Medjool dates at Costco and calls for membership cancellations, but it is campaign material rather than independently verified evidence of current Costco sourcing, contract status, or settlement origin ¹¹.

• No public evidence identified.

• Costco was not named in the supplied full-text scan of UN Special Rapporteur report A/HRC/59/23; this is limited to that document and does not establish the absence of relationships outside it ¹².

• Costco was not listed in the supplied 2023 or 2025 OHCHR settlement-business database updates, which concern specified settlement-related activities and are not comprehensive lists of all potentially relevant business conduct ^{13, 14}.

• AFSC Investigate maintains a Costco profile addressing prison- or convict-labour supply-chain concerns, rather than an Israel/Palestine or settlement-activity allegation on the reviewed page ¹⁵.

Internal Governance, Content & Retail Policies

• Costco’s reviewed elections-and-advocacy policy provides that advocacy spending is generally overseen by the General Counsel ¹⁶.

• In 2021 SEC no-action correspondence, Costco represented that it had no PAC, did not intend to create one, and did not use company funds or assets to contribute to PACs, except that it rarely supported ballot-measure committees connected with Costco business interests ¹⁷.

• No public evidence identified.

• No public evidence identified in the reviewed sources of Costco executive or board action concerning pro-Palestinian employee speech, Israel/Palestine shareholder-resolution suppression, or company content moderation.

Brand Heritage & State Partnerships

• Costco’s corporate history states that Jim Sinegal and Jeff Brotman co-founded Costco Wholesale and opened its first Seattle warehouse in 1983, and that Costco merged with Price Club in 1993 ¹⁸.

• The reviewed corporate-history page does not state that either founder currently holds a company office or board seat ¹⁸.

• Israel National News reported in February 2023 that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich invited Costco to enter Israel’s retail market in a letter addressed to then-CEO W. Craig Jelinek and Chairman Hamilton E. James ¹⁹.

• The reported invitation is not evidence of a Costco agreement, investment, market entry, or response, and no official response was located in the supplied research ¹⁹.

• No public evidence identified in the reviewed filings of state ownership, a golden share, or a charter-defined geopolitical or state-infrastructure mission ¹.

Lobbying, Advocacy, Financing & Logistics

• No public evidence identified in the reviewed sources of Costco corporate donations or crisis logistics directed to the IDF, FIDF, JNF/KKL, Israeli settlement bodies, Israeli government agencies, or military-welfare organisations.

• No supportable evidence was identified in the bounded research of Costco corporate lobbying, PAC activity, political spending, or trade-association work specifically concerning Israel/Palestine, settlement commerce, or anti-BDS legislation.

• Hamilton E. James is disclosed as chair of family investment firm Jefferson River Capital and previously served as Blackstone’s executive vice chairman until January 2022 ²⁰.

• The James Family Charitable Foundation’s 2022 filing identifies James as president/treasurer, reports no lobbying, political-campaign intervention, or political-purpose spending, and records zero compensation for James and Amabel B. James ²¹.

• The same 2022 filing reports $11,415,244 in grants paid and returns no text match for “Israel,” “Jewish,” or “Palestin” within the reviewed grant schedule ²¹.

• A 2021 James Family Charitable Foundation filing is publicly available, but its grant schedule was not fully extracted in the supplied research and supports no conclusion regarding Israel/Palestine-connected recipients ²².

• Human review recovered and inspected the foundation’s newer, complete fiscal-2024 Form 990-PF grant schedule. It contains 83 named recipients and records a $40,000 general-purpose grant to Jewish Voters Unite; Hamilton E. James is identified as the foundation’s president and treasurer ²³.

• Jewish Voters Unite describes itself as a 501(c)(3) established to mobilise Jewish voters in city, state, and federal elections. Its own leadership page highlights a “landmark voter turnout effort” in the Bowman–Latimer primary and identifies a partnerships manager whose prior advocacy included strengthening US–Israel relations ²⁴.

• JNS reported that the organisation’s founder linked its creation to the 2024 defeat of Jamaal Bowman, whom the article characterised as known for anti-Israel comments; the same report quotes the founder describing elected officials as anti-Israel or apathetic about antisemitism ²⁵. This supports treating the grant as Israel-relevant political-mobilisation evidence, but the filing labels it only “GENERAL” and does not show candidate endorsement, Israel-specific earmarking, lobbying, military welfare, settlement support, or use of Costco corporate funds ^{23, 24, 25}.

• Human review also inspected the complete fiscal-2023 schedule (77 named recipients) and found no recipient whose name expressly identified Israel, Palestine, Zionism, AIPAC, FIDF, JNF, or a comparable conflict-specific organisation; this is a source-scoped finding, not proof that no recipient had an indirect connection ²⁶.

Corporate Structure & Primary Mission

• Costco Wholesale Corporation is a Washington corporation with principal executive offices in Issaquah, Washington, and its common stock is registered under the ticker COST ¹.

• Costco and its wholly owned subsidiaries operate membership warehouses and e-commerce sites, and the company’s financial statements consolidate Costco and its wholly owned subsidiaries ¹.

• Costco’s FY2025 filing describes a membership-retail and e-commerce business and does not identify a state-held ownership interest, state-security mandate, or corporate mission tied to advancing an Israeli or other state geopolitical objective ¹.

• As of 7 November 2025, Costco’s proxy identified Vanguard Group as beneficial owner of 9.79% of shares and BlackRock as beneficial owner of 7.83%, with no beneficial owner above 10% identified ²⁷.

Executive & Leadership Footprint

• Costco’s December 2025 proxy identifies Ron M. Vachris as President, Chief Executive Officer, and director, and Hamilton E. James as non-executive Chairman ²⁷.

• The proxy lists Susan L. Decker, Kenneth D. Denman, Helena B. Foulkes, Sally Jewell, Jeffrey S. Raikes, John W. Stanton, and Mary Agnes Wilderotter as directors, while Gina Raimondo was a director candidate rather than an incumbent director ²⁷.

• The named executive officers include Gary Millerchip, Russ D. Miller, Pierre Riel, Javier Polit, and former executive vice president Richard Galanti, alongside Vachris ²⁷.

• James is disclosed as chairman of Jefferson River Capital; Denman is a Motorola Solutions director and Sway Ventures general partner; Raikes co-founded the Raikes Foundation; and Raimondo served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 2021 to 2025 ²⁷.

• No public evidence identified in the reviewed current SEC filings and focused searches of Vachris, James, Sinegal, Brotman, and specified directors of documented FIDF, JNF/KKL, AIPAC, IDF, settlement-organisation, or Israel/Palestine advocacy activity ²⁷.