A Familiar Red Sign, Now on Preston Road
The signage went up weeks ago. Drivers heading south on Preston Road past Ownsby Parkway have been slowing down to look, pulling out their phones, and then texting the same thing to family group chats across Collin County: it is actually happening. The exterior shell of Costco Wholesale Celina is fully complete, the permanent warehouse signage is installed, and the parking lot landscaping is in the ground. Inside, crews are working through the final buildout details ahead of the store’s confirmed opening date of August 26, 2026.
For a city that has added tens of thousands of residents over the past several years and watched its retail footprint struggle to keep pace, the arrival of a full-scale Costco carries genuine weight.
What the Store Looks Like on the Ground
The building sits at the corner of Preston Road and Ownsby Parkway, anchoring what is shaping up to be one of the more heavily trafficked retail intersections in North Celina. At 158,000 square feet, the warehouse is built to the standard Costco footprint — wide, flat, and unmistakable from a quarter mile away.
From the outside, the structure appears finished. Concrete, steel framing, and the red-and-blue brand colors are all in place. The parking field is laid out and the perimeter landscaping that distinguishes a completed Costco site from an active construction zone has been planted. The work happening now is interior: racking, refrigeration, food court equipment, tire center infrastructure, and the thousand other details that have to be right before a membership warehouse can welcome its first cart.
August 26 is the date to circle.
Why This Particular Store Matters to Celina
Celina residents have had a practical answer to the Costco question for years: drive to Frisco, Allen, or McKinney. Those are not short trips for families living in the newer neighborhoods north of Highway 380, and the detour is long enough that some households simply skip it and order online instead. A location in Celina changes that math entirely.
Beyond convenience, the store represents a signal about how outside retailers now read the city’s growth trajectory. Costco is not a brand that opens speculatively in markets it does not believe in. The company studies membership density, rooftop counts, and household income patterns carefully before committing to a 158,000-square-foot lease. Its presence here is, in a quiet way, a third-party endorsement of where Celina is headed.
For the city’s economic development ecosystem, it also creates downstream effects. A Costco draws traffic, and traffic attracts the surrounding retail and restaurant tenants that continue filling in the corridors along Preston Road and its cross streets.
The Broader Context Along the Preston Corridor
The Costco site does not exist in isolation. The stretch of Preston Road running through Celina and toward the Celina-McKinney border has been absorbing commercial development at a pace that feels almost monthly to longtime residents. Business parks, flex industrial space, and service retail have all been landing along the corridor as the residential population base has grown large enough to support them.
The Celina Economic Development Corporation has been active in tracking and recruiting commercial projects that broaden the city’s tax base and reduce the burden that falls almost entirely on residential property when retail lags behind housing growth. A store of this scale, drawing members from Celina and the surrounding communities, fits squarely into the kind of commercial anchor the EDC has been working toward.
What Comes Next
The six weeks between now and August 26 will be spent on interior finishing and the logistical work of stocking a warehouse at this scale — pallets of merchandise, refrigerated and frozen sections, the bakery, the pharmacy, the optical department, and the food court that Costco members tend to treat as a destination in its own right.
Once the store opens, Celina will join a short list of North Texas cities with their own Costco location. For families who moved here partly on the promise that the amenities would eventually catch up to the subdivisions, August 26 is one of those dates that delivers on that promise in a concrete, weekly-grocery-run kind of way.
No membership card required to appreciate what the red sign on Preston Road means for the city.
