BJ's Earnings Aug 21: Comps Ran 1.5% Into a 2-3% Guide

TL;DR

• BJ's Wholesale reports fiscal second quarter results Friday, August 21, before the open, with the call at 8:00am ET. It closes retail earnings week, the morning the flash PMIs land.
• Last quarter's headline comp was 6.3%. Excluding gasoline it was 1.5%. Fuel supplied 4.8 points of the number people quoted.
• The full-year guide is 2.0% to 3.0% ex-gasoline, and management reaffirmed it unchanged after that 1.5% quarter. To land inside it, the remaining three quarters have to run roughly 2.2% to 3.5%.
• Friday's comparison base is a real one: a year ago BJ's did 2.3% ex-gas comps and $1.14 of EPS. Beating it is the test, and the club did 1.5% in the quarter just gone.
• The stock closed Friday at $93.41, market cap $11.93 billion, near the low end of an $83.21 to $107.62 52-week range, on about 21.5 times trailing earnings.

When Does BJ's Wholesale Report Earnings?

BJ's Wholesale Club releases fiscal 2026 second quarter results before the market opens on Friday, August 21, 2026, with the conference call at 8:00am ET. The company's own labelling is fiscal 2026, for the year ending January 30, 2027, which is worth knowing because half the aggregators call the same print fiscal 2027.

It is the last of the week's retail reports, after Home Depot, Target, Walmart and the off-price pair. Everything else on Friday is in the week-ahead piece, and the rest of the month is in the earnings calendar.

The Board

One quarter, two comp numbers, and only one of them is what the company guides on.

Gasoline Supplied 4.8 of Those 6.3 Points

BJ's first quarter press release reports comparable club sales up 6.3%, and comparable club sales excluding gasoline up 1.5%. Both figures are correct. The difference is fuel, which sells in enormous dollar volumes at thin margin and swings with the pump price rather than with anything management does.

Which of the two you quote decides what kind of quarter you think it was.

Gasoline added 4.8 points in the first quarter. A year earlier it did the opposite: second quarter comps came in at negative 0.3% in total while ex-gas ran positive 2.3%, because pump prices were falling. Same business, opposite sign, entirely down to crude. Oil has been climbing since, so I would expect Friday's headline comp to flatter the ex-gas number again.

This is exactly why the company guides on the ex-gasoline figure, and it is the figure to read first on Friday morning.

What the Reaffirmed Guide Requires

Management left fiscal 2026 guidance unchanged in May: ex-gasoline comparable club sales of 2.0% to 3.0%, adjusted EPS of $4.40 to $4.60, capital expenditure around $800 million.

Run it forward. With the first quarter in at 1.5%, the remaining three quarters have to average roughly 2.2% to reach the bottom of the comp band and roughly 3.5% to reach the top. That is an unweighted approximation, since quarters do not contribute equally, but the direction is not in doubt: the guide needs the business to speed up from here, having reaffirmed it after a quarter that came in below the bottom of the range.

The earnings line has the same shape. Q1 delivered $1.10 of adjusted EPS, so the back three quarters carry $3.30 to $3.50 of the year, an average of $1.10 to $1.17 a quarter.

Reaffirming rather than trimming was a choice, and it was made with the second quarter already six weeks old. That is the most informative thing in the May release. Management could see the summer when they decided not to touch the number.

The Bar Friday Actually Has to Clear

A year ago, in the quarter ended August 2, 2025, BJ's produced ex-gas comps of 2.3%, EPS of $1.14 on both a GAAP and adjusted basis, and membership fee income of $123.3 million, up 9.0%, with member count crossing a record 8 million.

So the comparison base is a quarter that ran a full point better on comps than the one just reported, and earned four cents more per share than the quarter just reported. The club is lapping strength with a run rate that has softened.

The aggregator consensus I can find sits near $1.10 for Friday, which would be a decline against that $1.14. I would not lean hard on that figure: the same sources have the report date on August 22, and BJ's own newsroom says the 21st, which is enough sloppiness to make me treat the estimate as a rough marker rather than a bar.

Membership Fee Income Is the Part That Compounds

Membership fee income reached $132.4 million in the first quarter, up 9.9%. A year earlier the second quarter figure was $123.3 million, up 9.0%. If the same growth rate holds, Friday's number lands somewhere near $135 million, and that is my extrapolation rather than a company forecast.

It matters more than its size suggests. Membership fees are close to pure margin, they arrive whether or not the member buys anything that week, and they are the reason a warehouse club can run merchandise at a gross margin rate that would embarrass a supermarket. First-quarter merchandise gross margin was down about 10 basis points, and fee income covering that kind of drift is the whole architecture of the model.

Renewal rate and higher-tier mix are the two things I would listen for on the call. Both have been running in BJ's favour, and both would show up in the fee line before they show up in the comp.

Where the Sell Side Sits

Evercore ISI raised its price target to $100 from $95 on August 4, and Gordon Haskett upgraded the stock to Buy with a $115 target. Both are twelve-month sell-side numbers, not this site's, and both were struck before Friday's retail sales print showed spending down 0.6%.

At $93.41 the stock is closer to its 52-week low than its high and trades on about 21.5 times trailing earnings, which is a discount to where the club names traded through 2025. My read is that the market has already marked down the growth rate and is not yet pricing a guidance cut. That leaves the asymmetry on Friday tilted toward the comp number: 2% or better and the reaffirmed guide looks defensible, another 1.5% and the year has a problem the fourth quarter cannot fix on its own.

The One-Line Read

BJ's grew ex-gasoline comps 1.5% last quarter and then reaffirmed a 2% to 3% year anyway. Friday is where the club either finds the missing point or admits the guide needs rebasing.