My family and I recently took a trip out West. We didn’t catch our usual flight at Chicago's O’Hare International Airport, but instead we picked up our rental car—a Honda Odyssey.
The minivan wasn’t glamorous. It had a mysterious rattle, but once we got out of the city and pointed it west, it became our ship of adventure. Traveling west on Interstate 80, a gas-station waypoint we needed to visit was, of course, in Walcott, Iowa.
Heralded as the world’s largest truck stop, Iowa 80 sits on 220 acres and has more than 6,000 customers daily. It includes restaurants, stores, repair shops and more. I highly recommend visiting.
After crossing endless plains, we edged closer to distant mountains. Every gas station became a waypoint. We were always on the lookout for cheaper gas prices, especially when we arrived in California.
What we found in the Golden State were cars lined up around any Costco gas station that we could find. We joined the line of cars and ended up filling our tank with prices that were not too high. At the Costco in Merced, California, we paid under $5.16 a gallon.
I saw firsthand why, during its third-quarter 2026 earnings call, Costco CEO Ron Vachris told investors record-breaking volumes were achieved for the quarter. The warehouse giant reported in its third-quarter earnings at the end of May that gasoline comparable-store sales were up more than 20% in the quarter.
“All three four-week fiscal periods of the quarter set successive all-time company volume sales records, with the final five weeks of the quarter becoming our top five-volume weeks ever,” Vachris said, according to a transcript from financial services site AlphaSense. “Our gas team performed exceptionally well to manage this unprecedented demand, which requires multiple daily gas deliveries to many locations.”
And it’s evident. Costco is not pressing on the brakes anytime soon. In June, a standalone gas station opened in Mission Viejo, California.
Our road trip was a success, and like Odysseus navigating from island to island on his long journey home, we learned that the gas stations were never the destination. They were simply the necessary harbors that kept our Odyssey moving forward.
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