The conventional wisdom in conservative circles is simple: Costco doubled down on DEI when 98% of its shareholders rejected an anti-DEI proposal in 2025, while Sam's Club's parent company Walmart joined the great corporate retreat — quietly walking back diversity goals, supplier programs, and Pride visibility. So Sam's Club is the "anti-woke" warehouse, right?
Not according to the Buy Woke Free database. When you stack the actual BWF Woke Scores side-by-side, the narrative collapses. Walmart scores 90/100 — the "extremely woke" tier — while Costco lands at 45/100, the moderate "woke" tier. That's a 45-point gap in the wrong direction for shoppers who think Sam's Club is the patriot's pick.
The Headline Numbers: Walmart 90, Costco 45
Here is what the BWF database shows on the two parent companies powering America's warehouse club aisles:
- Costco Wholesale — 45/100 (Woke). BWF's score summary describes Costco as a brand that "straddles the line of wokeness, aiming to appease the woke consumer without going full throttle." Costco avoids prominently featuring DEI on its homepage and has historically been more transactional than evangelical about its diversity work.
- Walmart — 90/100 (Extremely Woke). BWF's score summary cuts through the rollback PR: "Despite a late-2024 DEI rollback, the retailer maintained years of ESG reporting, extensive DEI programs ($100M racial equity commitment), Platinum-level Pride sponsorships, perfect HRC CEI scores, and CEO Action signatory status."
Sam's Club is a wholly-owned division of Walmart — its supply chain, executive leadership, employment policies, supplier diversity programs, and corporate political giving all funnel up to Bentonville. When you swipe a Sam's Club membership card, you are funding the Walmart enterprise. That includes the parts of Walmart that the rollback announcements never touched.
Why the "Walmart Rolled Back" Story Misleads Conservatives
In late 2024, Walmart announced a series of DEI changes after pressure from conservative activist Robby Starbuck: it stopped using the term "DEI," sunset its Center for Racial Equity grant cycle, ended participation in the HRC Corporate Equality Index survey, and tightened supplier diversity rules. The headlines were huge. The actual corporate scaffolding underneath? Mostly intact.
The Receipts BWF Tracks
- $100 Million Racial Equity Commitment. Walmart's five-year, $100M Center for Racial Equity pledge is largely already spent — funding HBCUs, racial-equity nonprofits, and "criminal justice reform" groups. The rollback cancels future grants but does not claw back a dollar of what is already on the street.
- Perfect HRC Corporate Equality Index Scores. Walmart held 100/100 ratings on the Human Rights Campaign's CEI for years, including the policy commitments that earn those scores: gender-identity nondiscrimination, transgender-inclusive healthcare benefits, and supplier non-discrimination requirements. Withdrawing from the survey doesn't repeal the underlying benefits.
- Platinum-Level Pride Sponsorships. Walmart has been one of the largest corporate Pride sponsors in retail, with Pride merchandise programs and donations to LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. The 2025 Pride season was scaled back in stores, but the giving pipelines and ERG (employee resource group) infrastructure remain.
- CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion Signatory. CEO Doug McMillon signed the CEO Action pledge — a public commitment to "advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace." The signature has not been withdrawn.
- OpenSecrets Political Giving. Walmart's PAC and employee giving has consistently leaned bipartisan-to-left on the issues that drive BWF's political score, particularly through trade associations that lobby on ESG disclosure and DEI procurement rules.
The takeaway: the rollback is a communications strategy, not a corporate dismantling. The underlying woke infrastructure — what BWF measures across six research-based dimensions — is still humming.
What Costco Actually Is — and Isn't
Costco is not woke-free. The 45/100 score is real. The retailer publicly defended its DEI program against a January 2025 shareholder challenge from the National Center for Public Policy Research and won that vote 98% to 2%. Costco files an ESG report. It has supplier diversity goals. It made the standard George Floyd-era racial-equity statements.
But Costco has also historically not chased the most aggressive woke signals that drive BWF scores skyward:
- Costco does not participate in the HRC CEI in the same maximalist way Walmart did, and does not advertise a perfect score.
- Costco is not a Platinum-tier Pride parade sponsor in the way Walmart, Target, and Bud Light's parent have been.
- Costco is not a CEO Action signatory.
- Costco's political giving through its corporate PAC has historically run more bipartisan than Walmart's, with notable Republican-leaning giving in red-state districts.
- Costco famously dropped Palmetto Cheese from its shelves over its founder's BLM comments — a genuinely woke move — but Costco has never built the activist scaffolding Walmart built.
Costco's wokeness is, in BWF's words, "calculated" — just enough to avoid the woke mob, not enough to lead the parade. Walmart, despite its rollback rebrand, is still operating with the activist infrastructure of the parade's grand marshal.
The Verdict: Sam's Club Is Not the Conservative Refuge
If you cancel your Costco card and switch to Sam's Club to "vote with your wallet" against woke capitalism, the BWF data says you have voted for the more woke option, not the less woke one. Sam's Club inherits Walmart's 90/100 score the moment your dues hit the corporate ledger.
That doesn't mean Costco is a moral victory. A 45/100 score still means Costco is appeasing the woke consumer in measurable ways. But on a strict head-to-head — and that's what a comparison article is for — Costco is the lesser evil at the warehouse-club tier.
If You Actually Want Woke-Free
The BWF database is full of bulk-buy and grocery alternatives that score 0–10/100 on the Woke Score. If your goal is to eliminate woke spending entirely, neither Costco nor Sam's Club gets you there. Consider:
- Goya Foods (BWF: 0/100, Not Woke) for pantry staples and bulk dry goods. Goya took the 2020 cancel-mob hit and never apologized; it is one of the highest-rated mainstream consumer brands in the BWF database.
- Local independent cash-and-carry warehouses and farm cooperatives that don't carry the corporate ESG/HRC/Pride apparatus at all. BWF's directory lists hundreds of small-business alternatives by category.
- Black Rifle Coffee, In-N-Out Burger, and other 0/100-rated brands for the categories where you can substitute brand-by-brand instead of switching the entire warehouse experience.
The Bottom Line
The post-2024 corporate DEI rollback is the most important narrative shift in the consumer landscape since 2020 — and it is also the most exploitable. Companies are racing to look anti-woke without actually dismantling the infrastructure they built during the woke peak. Walmart is the textbook case. Sam's Club is the consumer-facing storefront for that strategy.
Costco didn't bother with the rollback theater because it never went as deep on the woke build-out in the first place. That's a strange thing to defend, but it is what the numbers say. Conservative shoppers deserve numbers, not narratives — and the BWF Woke Score is built precisely to cut through corporate communications strategy and measure what companies actually do with their money, their benefits packages, their political giving, and their public commitments.
Score one for Costco in this matchup. And score zero for the assumption that any Walmart-owned business — Sam's Club included — is suddenly a conservative safe harbor in 2026.