Costco Opened on Preston Road. The Real Change Happened in the Two Months Around It.
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
If you live anywhere near Preston Road and Ownsby Parkway in south Celina, you already know Costco opened on August 26. You've probably driven past it. Maybe you've already been inside for rotisserie chicken and gas that's cheaper than the Shell station up the street. That part of the story is old news by now.
What most residents haven't put together yet is the timing. Costco wasn't a lone anchor dropping into empty land. It was the middle event in a run of openings that compressed what usually takes a Texas retail corridor two or three years into a window of about eight weeks. Chipotle opened July 7. Costco followed August 26. Home Depot and Academy Sports + Outdoors opened within days of Costco, according to the Celina Economic Development Corporation's own announcement. That's four major stores landing on the same stretch of road inside of two months, not a slow trickle you'd barely notice.
That compression is the actual story, and it's why the corner feels like it flipped overnight instead of filling in gradually the way these things usually do.
Normally the sequence goes anchor first, restaurants later. A big box or grocery store opens, proves the traffic count, and the dining tenants follow over the next couple of years once the leasing offices see the rooftops are real. Preston Road did it backward.
Mo' Bettahs Hawaiian Style Food opened in Celina on March 20, its 12th Texas location and 78th systemwide, at 3505 S. Preston Road, right across from where Lowe's already sits and next to Christian Brothers Automotive. Torchy's Tacos followed on April 15 at a 3,800-square-foot spot on the same stretch. Both restaurants opened months before Costco, Home Depot, or Academy Sports had cut a single ribbon.
That means the corridor's dining scene showed up first, almost as a bet that the anchors were coming, and then the anchors arrived in one concentrated burst over the summer. If you've eaten a Bang Bang Shrimp taco at Torchy's or a plate lunch at Mo' Bettahs sometime this spring while the Costco site was still mid-construction, you were eating at a restaurant that opened ahead of the infrastructure everyone assumed would justify it.
Here's the run in order, and it's worth seeing it laid out because the density is the point:
Four major openings, eight weeks, one corridor. The Celina Current described the scene in the run-up to Costco's opening in a way that captures what that density actually looked like on the ground: drivers heading south on Preston Road past Ownsby Parkway had started 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."
That's not exaggeration for a press release. That's what it looks like when a corridor that has been mostly promises and dirt for years suddenly delivers four of them back to back.
The practical change for anyone living in Bluewood, Carter Ranch, or the neighborhoods south of Ownsby Parkway isn't really about Costco's square footage. It's about which drive you no longer have to make.
For years, the honest answer to "where do you do your Costco run" if you lived in Celina was Frisco or Little Elm, sometimes further. That trip had a real cost in time, not just gas. Now it's a local errand instead of a planned outing, and the fuel station adds a second layer to that math. Warehouse-club pricing tends to run below the surrounding market, which means the gas stop that used to require a special trip is now something you can fold into a Costco run without adding time to your day.
If you're not currently a Costco member, the calculus is different but the same shape. A membership fee makes more sense when the store is five minutes away than when it required planning a specific afternoon around the drive. That's not a sales pitch, it's just arithmetic that changed on August 26 whether you'd been waiting for it or not.
A few practical notes if your last drive down Preston Road predates the openings.
The corridor now reads as two bookends. The Village at Ownsby Farms, on the southwest corner, is the destination-retail side, anchored by Costco. The Crossing at Moore Farm, on the northeast side, is the home improvement and everyday-services side, home to Home Depot and now Chipotle as an end cap. Between the two, you're looking at groceries, fuel, tools, sporting goods, and a growing lineup of quick-service and fast-casual dining without leaving a half-mile stretch of road.
Traffic around Preston and Ownsby has been under real pressure this year, and not just from shoppers. Oncor completed comprehensive electric infrastructure inspections in Celina in October 2025 and began a reliability improvement project in February 2026, with utility work at the Costco site adding new poles and traffic safety measures on top of the store construction itself. If you noticed the Preston-Ownsby signal needing an extra cycle or two through late August, that's four grand openings and an active utility project sharing the same intersection at the same time. It's a reasonable expectation that the light settles into a more normal rhythm once the newest-store curiosity traffic tapers, but if you're headed down there on a weekend afternoon anytime soon, build in a few extra minutes.
There's more coming, too, even if it's not urgent yet. Bojangles has confirmed it's opening in Celina, targeting sometime this year, though no exact date has landed publicly. Brunch Factory, a new upscale brunch concept from Toni Mehmedi, the owner behind the longtime Celina Star Cafe, is aiming for a spring 2027 opening in Celina West, positioned as a more elevated follow-up to the mom-and-pop breakfast spot Mehmedi has run for a decade. Neither of those changes the current picture, but they're worth knowing about if you're the type who tracks what's headed for the corridor next.
The headline everyone already has is that Costco opened in Celina. The part worth actually knowing is that it didn't open alone, and it didn't open into a vacuum. Chipotle, Home Depot, and Academy Sports landed in the same eight-week window, on top of a dining scene that had already been building since March. That's the difference between a single store opening and a corridor finishing. If Preston Road felt like a construction zone with promises attached for the last couple of years, this summer is when the promises turned into a place you can actually run your Saturday errands and grab dinner without crossing into Frisco.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's changing in your own neighborhood before it shows up in a group text, that's exactly the kind of thing Mike Farish tracks across Celina, Prosper, Frisco, and the rest of North Collin County. And if watching a corridor like this fill in has you wondering what it's actually done to your home's value, that's a conversation worth having. Get your free home valuation and find out where you stand.
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