Costco Puts Nearly 600 Warehouses on DoorDash and Uber Eats, Handing Last-Mile Delivery to Gig Platforms Nationwide

Costco spent years as the conspicuous holdout among major U.S. retailers on same-day delivery, leaning almost entirely on Instacart for the rare member who wanted a warehouse order brought to the door. That changed twice in three days. Uber announced on Sept. 16 that its existing Costco partnership — running in 17 states — was expanding to 47, with nearly 600 Costco locations now bookable on Uber Eats for on-demand and scheduled delivery. Then, on Sept. 17, DoorDash announced Costco was joining its Marketplace app nationwide, giving members access to more than 4,000 products including Kirkland Signature items, with the arrangement building on an existing DoorDash-Costco relationship already running in Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland and Puerto Rico.

Neither company's release states a contract value, a revenue-share structure or a minimum-volume commitment, which is itself informative: this is being built as an asset-light marketplace listing, not a logistics buildout. Costco is not adding trucks, hiring drivers or leasing delivery vans. It is renting distribution capacity from two platforms that already have it, in the same way a smaller retailer would.

The numbers each company chose to publish tell slightly different stories about their own competitive position. DoorDash's release emphasizes reach: the company says it now partners with 8 of the 10 largest food retailers in North America, and frames Costco as one of the most-searched retailers previously unavailable on its platform. Uber's release emphasizes scale of the specific deal — the jump from 17 states to 47, and "nearly 600" warehouse locations — while offering sign-up incentives on the consumer side: 50% off a first year of Uber One for eligible Costco members, discounted Uber gift cards, and 30% off a first qualifying Costco order placed through Uber Eats. Andrew Macdonald, Uber's president and chief operating officer, is quoted calling Costco "one of the largest and most trusted retailers in the country," while DoorDash's Mike Goldblatt, vice president of enterprise partnerships, said members had been "asking for Costco on DoorDash" for some time.

Independent coverage adds context the releases leave out. Grocery Dive and PYMNTS both note this lands just before Costco reports fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on Sept. 24, meaning any near-term order volume from the launch will not show up in the results investors see first; a Yahoo Finance analysis made the same point directly, arguing the DoorDash rollout "came too late to touch the quarter it reports." That timing detail is worth flagging because it means neither Wall Street nor Costco's own membership base will have real usage data on this launch before the company's next public accounting of its business.

What It Means for Carriers and Forwarders

This is not a freight-lane story in the traditional sense — no ocean box, no drayage move, no line-haul contract changes hands here. But it is a capacity-allocation story with a real forwarder angle, and it's worth reading past the retail headline for three reasons.

The first is what it confirms about where last-mile capacity is actually coming from. Gig and crowdsourced delivery platforms — DoorDash, Uber, Instacart and their peers — have been steadily taking share from dedicated parcel and local-delivery fleets for years. Online sales now run around 16.5% of total U.S. retail and are growing roughly 10% annually, and alternative delivery carriers have grown from 2.6% of the parcel market in 2021 to 8.5% today, according to figures cited in coverage of the deal. Costco's move is a large, visible data point in that shift: one of the country's largest retailers by revenue just concluded, in writing, that building its own last-mile network is not worth doing when two platforms will do it on a per-order basis instead.

The second is counterparty concentration. Costco now depends on Uber and DoorDash — in addition to its long-standing Instacart relationship — for a delivery channel it does not control operationally. Any service disruption, driver-supply problem, or pricing renegotiation at either platform now has a direct line to Costco's delivery experience in a way that a dedicated fleet would insulate it from. A logistics manager evaluating any large retail account's delivery resilience should treat multi-platform gig dependence as a specific, named risk, not a generic "last-mile capacity" line item.

The third is the earnings-timing gap Grocery Dive and Yahoo Finance both flagged. Because the launch falls just before Costco's Sept. 24 fiscal Q4 report, there is no public volume data yet on how members are actually using either platform. Anyone modeling incremental e-commerce lift for Costco, or benchmarking DoorDash's and Uber's own delivery-volume growth against this specific launch, should wait for at least one full reporting cycle — likely Costco's fiscal Q1 2027 results — before treating any interim estimate as more than a guess.