John Chevedden is a well-known individual governance activist with a strong track record of submitting mainstream governance proposals; this filer type receives serious consideration under our policy. The proposal asks BJ's to replace any remaining supermajority voting requirements in its governing documents with simple majority standards — a straightforward governance improvement that reduces entrenchment and aligns shareholder voting power with standard market practice. While BJ's reduced one supermajority standard in 2022, the company's own proxy summary still advertises 'No supermajority vote requirements,' yet the board's opposition statement acknowledges that supermajority standards may remain through state-law defaults and other provisions — suggesting the 2022 action was incomplete. Eliminating supermajority vote requirements is widely supported by institutional investors and has received near-unanimous support at many comparable companies, and the board's opposition does not identify any specific shareholder-protective purpose served by the remaining provisions.

Trillium ESG Small/Mid Cap Fund is an ESG-focused advocacy fund whose proposals are primarily driven by environmental advocacy goals rather than neutral fiduciary investor interests; under our policy, proposals from ideological filers — whether conservative or progressive — are voted against regardless of the surface framing, because they serve advocacy rather than shareholder value goals. This conclusion is reinforced by the prior-year vote result: the same proposal received only 30% shareholder support in 2025, falling in the range where merits govern with no strong presumption of support, and the ideological filer classification is itself disqualifying. Even setting aside filer identity, the proposal's ask — an annually updated report on how BJ's could expand its GHG reduction efforts — goes beyond material financial disclosure into prescriptive climate advocacy, which does not meet the higher bar required for operational or policy-change asks.

The New York State Common Retirement Fund is a large public pension fund — a credible, mainstream fiduciary investor with no ideological bias — whose proposals warrant serious evaluation on the merits. The ask is a disclosure proposal: a one-time assessment of deforestation risks in BJ's private-label supply chain, which the company itself acknowledges is growing (now 26% of sales and expected to increase), using commodities like beef, palm oil, and soy that are well-documented drivers of deforestation. BJ's decision in 2025 to remove all sustainability disclosure from its website — including prior corporate responsibility reports — while simultaneously growing its private-label exposure to deforestation-linked commodities makes this disclosure request more material, not less; peers including Costco, Kroger, and Albertsons have published comparable assessments, and BJ's opposition arguments about cost and disruption do not adequately address the genuine supply chain risk that growing private-label dependence on unmonitored commodity sourcing poses to long-term shareholder value.