Costco Tops ChangeUp's 2026 Customer Experience Report

What happened

Costco has taken the top spot in ChangeUp's second annual "2026 Experience Report," displacing grocery chain H-E-B, which held the number one position previously and now ranks second. The report scores the top 50 retail brands and top 50 restaurant brands on customer experience, based on a survey of more than 6,500 consumers covering over 300 brands and generating more than 400,000 data points.

Alongside Costco and H-E-B, running specialty retailer Fleet Feet also scored above the retail category average across nearly every dimension measured in the study. ChangeUp CEO Lee Carpenter said consumers remain willing to spend on experiences but are taking fewer shopping trips and expecting more from each one, meaning the brands at the top of the rankings are those giving customers a distinct reason to visit and a memorable reason to return.

Why it matters

The ranking reinforces a theme that experience leaders have been tracking for several years: customer expectations are a moving target, and relative standing can shift even for brands that haven't changed anything themselves. Carpenter's observation that a brand can "do everything it did last year and still lose ground" because competitors are improving faster captures a core dynamic in experience management — standing still is effectively falling behind.

For retail and restaurant leaders, the report is a reminder that experience investment needs to be benchmarked against a rising baseline, not a fixed internal standard. As consumer trip frequency declines, each visit becomes higher-stakes, putting more pressure on service design, store or dining environment, and the perceived value exchange to justify the trip in the first place.

By the numbers

• 6,500+ consumers surveyed for the 2026 Experience Report
• 300+ brands assessed across retail and restaurant categories
• 400,000+ data points collected to produce the rankings
• Top 50 retail brands and Top 50 restaurant brands ranked in the report

The Renascence take

The headline here isn't that Costco overtook H-E-B — it's the mechanism Carpenter describes, where relative experience quality can erode passively as competitors improve. That's a behavioral reality many operators underestimate, because internal metrics tend to be compared against last year's own performance rather than against what customers are experiencing elsewhere in the same week.

Experience is judged relatively, not absolutely — customers don't benchmark a brand against its own history, they benchmark it against the best experience they had anywhere recently. Operators chasing "parity with last year" are quietly losing ground to competitors chasing "better than last month." The practical fix is to treat experience benchmarking as a continuous, external exercise rather than an annual internal review, and to invest specifically in the few high-frequency moments — the reason to make the trip, and the reason to remember it — that are hardest for rivals to copy.