BJ’s opening its first new Mass. store in more than a decade

BJ's Wholesale Club CEO Bob Eddy recently embarked on the most aggressive expansion in the company's history. Lane Turner/Globe Staff

With a big presence in its home state of Massachusetts, BJ’s Wholesale Club chief executive Bob Eddy has looked elsewhere for expansion in recent years. However, with the success of the Marlborough-based chain’s westward march across the country, Eddy has decided it’s time now to invest a bit more back home as well.

Toward that end, BJ’s announced this week that it’s building a store in Springfield, its first new club in Massachusetts in 13 years — as it opens stores at a clip of 10 to 15 a year. The pace is much faster lately, compared to the days in the mid-2010s when BJ’s was only opening one or two a year, or none at all. The chain had 215 stores at the time of its 2018 initial public offering. That number is now up to 255.

The other Western Mass. stores include locations in Greenfield, Pittsfield, and Chicopee. Springfield, Eddy said, will open by the end of the year, among eight or nine stores expected to debut in the remainder of 2025. About 100 to 150 people will work at the new store, typical for a BJ’s (though a warehouse going up in Ohio will run almost entirely on robot labor).

“Once we started to turn the ship around from a new club perspective, ... we started looking around the chain about where we wanted to put new locations [within our existing footprint],” Eddy said. “We’ve already heard a lot from the community now that they know we’re coming.”

The pace of store openings has picked up in the past year, Eddy said. BJ’s is still smaller than its wholesale club rivals, Costco and Sam’s Club. But Eddy says the company offers lower prices than supermarkets while offering far more variety than its two big club competitors, a recipe that has proven attractive to customers, new and old. Revenue rose nearly 5 percent, to $5 billion, for the quarter that ended in early May, from the same time a year ago.

The company’s newest clubs, he said, have outperformed expectations.

“It’s causing us to try to accelerate even more,” Eddy said. “People have been through a lot from an inflation perspective in the past couple of years [and] we’re just a great destination when people want to save money.”

This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston’s business scene.