Costco trimmed the price of a two-pound bag of Kirkland Signature walnuts from $13.79 to $9.99 as part of the fourth-quarter results it reported on September 24, 2026. Chief Financial Officer Gary Millerchip named the walnut cut on the earnings call alongside three other reductions, and Chief Executive Officer Ron Vachris told analysts the company is putting part of its tariff refunds toward lower prices for members. The disclosures capped a quarter in which Costco’s sales grew faster than they have in several years.
A $3.80 cut on Kirkland Signature walnuts
The walnut reduction was one of four specific price cuts Millerchip read aloud while covering the 16 weeks that ended August 30, 2026. Alongside the walnuts, he listed Kirkland Signature Colombian whole bean coffee dropping from $21.99 to $19.99, Kirkland Signature dry facial towels falling from $19.99 to $18.99, and Kirkland Signature coarse black pepper going from $6.99 to $5.99, according to a transcript of the earnings call. All four are Kirkland Signature items, the private-label brand Costco uses across a large share of what it sells.
Millerchip did not say how long the lower walnut price will stay in effect or how much volume Costco expects to move at $9.99. The figures came inside the routine quarterly walk-through of sales and margin trends that Costco’s finance chief gives analysts, rather than as a standalone pricing announcement aimed at shoppers, and none of the four items was described as a limited-time promotion the way a seasonal coupon book item often is.
Costco has not said whether it expects to hold the new $9.99 price through the holiday baking season, when demand for baking nuts and coffee both typically rises, or whether it will revisit any of the four prices once the rest of the fiscal year’s tariff-refund accounting is finalized. Millerchip’s comments were limited to the four items he named on the call; he did not say whether other departments received similar treatment.
Two documents that outlast a single earnings call: The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit pairs the 5 kinds of property-tax relief with an application log and a renewal calendar, so a filing window closing this year does not slip past unnoticed the way a temporary grocery price does. Open The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit to see where those windows stand.
The tariff refunds behind the reinvestment
Costco’s own fourth-quarter earnings release says the quarter “was positively impacted by a non-recurring benefit of $0.15 per diluted share from IEEPA tariff refunds received in the quarter, less partial reinvestment of those refunds in increased member values.” IEEPA is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law used to impose a wave of tariffs that courts later found improperly collected on some imports, triggering the refund process now working through Costco’s books and those of other large importers.
For the quarter, Costco reported net income of $2.998 billion on total revenue of $95.723 billion, and for the full fiscal year, net income of $9.226 billion on total revenue of $303.154 billion. Net sales for the fourth quarter alone rose 11.2 percent to $93.9 billion, with comparable sales up 9.4 percent, or 6.7 percent once gasoline prices and currency swings are stripped out, according to the same release.
What the chief executive told analysts about reinvestment
Vachris tied the price cuts directly to the refund during the call. “We received some initial tariff refunds in the fourth quarter and we reinvested some of these dollars to give value back to our members,” he said, adding that the reinvestment ran “predominantly through price reductions on a number of items … including everyday items in produce, meat and beverages,” according to the transcript. The walnut, coffee, towel and pepper cuts Millerchip listed sit inside that broader reinvestment, though the two executives did not break out how much of the $0.15-per-share benefit went specifically to those four items versus the wider produce, meat and beverage aisle.
Vachris had signaled the same intent months before any refund arrived. In March 2026, one day after a federal court ruling on the tariffs, he told analysts the company’s “commitment will be to find the best way to return this value to our members through lower prices and better values,” while cautioning the situation was “extremely fluid,” according to a Supply Chain Dive report from that call. September’s price cuts are the first concrete example of that pledge showing up on the shelf.
A small slice of a much larger national refund pool
Costco’s $0.15-per-share benefit is one company’s share of a far bigger process. Roughly $166 billion in duties collected under IEEPA are due to be refunded to the importers that paid them, according to the Tax Foundation’s tariff tracker, which follows the various 2025 and 2026 tariff actions and the court rulings that unwound some of them. Separately, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had completed $122 billion of refunds, including interest, against $134.7 billion in accepted claims as of late September 2026, with the agency’s next processing phase for outstanding claims set to open October 6, according to a 24/7 Wall St. report on the refund program, which named Costco among the retailers that have pledged to pass the money to customers.
Costco has not said publicly how much of its own refund total it has collected so far, or how much more of it, if any, will turn into additional price cuts in the warehouses. The four price cuts named on the call are, for now, the company’s only public accounting of where a piece of that money went.
A grocery-aisle marking, and a tax bill nobody marks down
A lower price on a bag of walnuts is the kind of saving a shopper can see and bank on the next trip. Property taxes and heating and cooling costs move far less visibly, and the relief programs built to soften them almost always require the homeowner or renter to file first, on a deadline the county sets and does not advertise.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit lays out the 5 kinds of property-tax relief and pairs an application log with a renewal calendar, so a filing window does not close unnoticed the way it can when nothing prompts a household to look.
Open the application log in The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to Costco’s own earnings materials.
