The Albertsons NOligarchy Profile
C
O
N
C
E
R
N
I
N
G
NOligarchy Score
25.0
/ 100
albertsons.com
0
Albertsons scores 24.87 out of 100 on the NOligarchy index — a failing grade that places it near the very bottom of accountability rankings across all tracked companies. A low score here does not mean a low-performing company; it means a company that has chosen, repeatedly, to spend on influence, extract wealth from its workforce, and accumulate a regulatory rap sheet. The lower the score, the more power the company has chosen to wield at the expense of workers, consumers, and the public.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
26.9
Wealth Extraction
36.8
Playing by the Rules
0.0
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
•
Political Access Grade: 26.94/100. Albertsons channeled $4.11 million into federal lobbying from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period), deployed a Political Action Committee (PAC) that funneled an additional $158,500 into federal campaigns, and tracked $23,980 in executive personal contributions through Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. Taken together, Albertsons ran a full-spectrum influence operation — lobbying for rule changes while simultaneously seeding campaigns across both parties.
•
Wealth Extraction Grade: 36.41/100. With a CEO-to-median-worker pay gap of 541:1 and over $1.56 billion in stock buybacks executed across two fiscal years, Albertsons’ executive suite captured an enormous share of the company’s cash. Its grocery and pharmacy workers — many earning just above minimum wage — were left well behind.
•
Playing by the Rules Grade: 0.0/100. This is the most damning number in the profile. Albertsons carried $780.3 million in total penalties across 31 cases over the two-year period, and a single pharmaceutical promotion settlement accounts for virtually all of it. The company ranks 2nd worst out of 8 in the Grocery Stores sector for regulatory penalties.
Albertsons ranks 7th out of 8 companies in the Grocery Stores sector. The sector average NOligarchy score is 54.8 — Albertsons lands roughly 30 points below that benchmark, trailing the industry baseline by a wide margin. For higher-scoring places to shop, see the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: A $780 Million Legal Tab, a $1.56 Billion Shareholder Payout, and Checkout-Lane Workers Earning $31,000 a Year
Albertsons generated $83.2 billion in annual revenue — enough to make it one of the largest grocery operators in the country — and then chose to spend $1.56 billion buying back its own stock across fiscal years 2024 and 2025, while the median Albertsons employee took home $30,978 a year: roughly $14.89 an hour, before taxes. At the same time, the company absorbed $780.3 million in regulatory fines — more than three-quarters of a billion dollars stemming primarily from a single pharmacy misconduct settlement. The sharpest imbalance in this data is not between shareholders and workers, though that gap is severe. It is between the scale of legal exposure the company was absorbing on one ledger and the scale of cash it was handing to investors on another — while the people stocking shelves and filling prescriptions saw neither benefit from the windfall nor protection from the culture that produced the violations.
Spending to Keep a Seat at the Table
Albertsons poured $4.11 million into federal lobbying across the two-year period, filing with the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) on issue after issue that touches its core business: food safety and labeling, pharmacy services, agricultural supply chains, and grocery competition. The company ran its PAC at the same time, contributing $158,500 to federal candidates and committees — a 64.7% Democratic, 35.3% Republican split, according to FEC records. For a company that sells groceries and fills prescriptions in thousands of stores across the country, these are not abstract policy debates — they are the rules that govern what Albertsons can charge, who it can squeeze in its supply chain, and whether its in-store pharmacies face new constraints on their profit margins.
The single heaviest focus was food industry issues, which drew 17 separate lobbying filings. Grocery supply chains are notoriously thin-margin businesses, and any shift in food labeling rules, import standards, or competition enforcement directly affects what Albertsons pays its suppliers and what it charges at the register. Close behind was labor and antitrust activity, logged in 10 filings — a category that carries obvious stakes for a company whose failed merger with Kroger was fought on exactly those grounds.
Federal Lobbying Spend by Quarter
$4.1M total
$810K
Q3 '24
$870K
Q4 '24
$530K
Q1 '25
$810K
Q2 '25
$50K
Q3 '25
$50K
Q4 '25
$550K
Q1 '26
$440K
Q2 '26
Pharmacy and agriculture each drew 9 filings. Albertsons operates in-store pharmacies that depend on the current reimbursement structure from Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) — the middlemen that negotiate drug prices between insurers and pharmacies. Lobbyists repeatedly cited the Pharmacy Benefit Manager Transparency Act of 2025 (S.526), still working through the Senate Commerce Committee, across filings on food, pharmacy, health, trade, and taxation issues. Any reform to how PBMs report their practices or set reimbursement rates has a direct impact on what the company collects every time a customer picks up a prescription.
Filings also named the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2025 (H.R. 2853) — referenced four times across food industry, labor, and law enforcement issue areas — and the earlier version of that legislation, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2023 (H.R. 895), twice more. Retail theft is a genuine operational problem for high-volume grocery chains, and the 2025 bill, currently placed on the Union Calendar, would create new federal tools to prosecute organized retail theft rings. Lobbyists also cited the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2024 (H.R. 8467), a sweeping agricultural policy vehicle covering everything from nutrition programs to commodity systems — directly relevant to a company that purchases food at industrial scale and operates Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) redemption at thousands of checkout lanes.
On credit card fees, lobbyists cited the Credit Card Competition Act of 2023 (H.R. 3881) in filings under financial institutions issues. Grocery stores operate on razor-thin margins and pay enormous sums in card-processing interchange fees — fees set by Visa and Mastercard — so any legislation that introduces competition into that market is worth millions to a company processing billions of transactions annually.
Albertsons deployed nine lobbyists through two external firms, one of which — BL Partners Group, LLC — also works for News Corp, giving it a shared-firm connection that can facilitate information flow across client networks.
Shared Lobbying Exposure
Albertsons
client
BL PARTNERS GROUP, LLC
lobbying firm
News Corp
also a client
Why it matters: the same firm argues Albertsons’s case and its rivals’ — one hire buys a web of shared access that can’t be seen from outside. This network worsens Albertsons’s political-access score (see methodology for the exact factor).
Albertsons executives made an additional $23,980 in personal campaign contributions tracked to their employer affiliation through FEC individual-contribution records — a modest sum but part of the same coordinated access strategy.
Buybacks for Shareholders, $31,000 a Year for the Checkout Lane
The CEO pay ratio at Albertsons is 541:1, according to the SEC DEF 14A. That means the executive at the top collected 541 times more in total compensation than the median Albertsons worker — someone earning $30,978 a year, or roughly $14.89 an hour before taxes. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $16.8 million. To match one year of that executive take-home, a checkout clerk or pharmacy technician would need to work for more than five centuries.
CEO — MEDIAN-PAY MARKER
JANUARY
9:00
10:00
11:00
12:00
12:51 PM — a median year, earned
1:00
passes the median employee’s full annual pay
12:51 PM · January 1
541× the median employee’s pay
At 541:1, Albertsons's CEO earns the median employee's entire annual pay by 12:51 PM on the first workday of the year.
The Shareholder Payout
Across fiscal years 2024 and 2025, Albertsons executed $1.56 billion in stock buybacks — $82.5 million in fiscal 2024 and $1.478 billion in fiscal 2025 — alongside steadily rising dividend payments: $295.1 million in fiscal 2024 and $322.7 million in fiscal 2025, according to SEC 10-K filings. Combined, the company directed roughly $2.18 billion to its shareholders across those two years. This money flowed to the wealthiest Americans — the top 10% of households own 93% of all stock — at the same time workers earning $31,000 a year stocked shelves, filled prescriptions, and processed grocery orders.
The Missed Raise
The company’s proxy statement does not disclose total employee headcount, which means a precise per-worker raise calculation cannot be made from the public record alone. What can be said plainly: $1.56 billion in buybacks — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — went to shareholders rather than to a workforce that the company’s own filings show earns a median of $30,978 a year. That figure sits thousands of dollars below the federal poverty line for a family of four. The choice was made; the math speaks for itself.
The Dividend Factor
Albertsons did not abandon traditional dividends in favor of buybacks — it ran both at scale. The company paid out $617.8 million in regular dividends across fiscal years 2024 and 2025 while simultaneously executing $1.56 billion in buybacks. That combination tells a clear story: Albertsons had the cash to reward investors through conventional means and chose to double down with buybacks on top. Buybacks are a more precise instrument than dividends — they reduce shares outstanding rather than paying cash to every holder, which concentrates the gains among insiders and large institutional investors who can time when they sell. The company chose to deploy both tools simultaneously rather than direct either stream toward the people running its stores.
Executive Bonuses
The buyback mechanism matters here. When Albertsons buys back its own shares, the total earnings of the company get divided across fewer shares — inflating Earnings Per Share (EPS) without the business actually earning more money. Executive compensation plans are typically pegged to EPS growth, so the same executives who approved the $1.56 billion in buybacks stood to collect larger performance bonuses as a direct result. Against a 541:1 pay gap, that structural loop compounds an already severe disparity.
A Three-Quarter-Billion-Dollar Pharmacy Settlement and a 31-Case Rap Sheet
Albertsons’ compliance record over the two-year period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 is defined by both scale and breadth.
The Pattern
The 31 cases on record span pharmacy law, consumer protection, employment discrimination, workplace safety, environmental rules, and wage violations. Twenty-four of those cases involve workplace safety or health citations spread across store locations throughout the country — $560,552 in penalties for the same category of offense, case after case during the two-year tracking period. That volume suggests not a series of isolated accidents but a persistent pattern in how the company manages physical conditions for its frontline staff.
WORKPLACE SAFETY OR HEALTH VIOLATION
24 SEPARATE CASES
2024–2026 · $560,552 in penalties
24 separate workplace safety or health violation penalties in 2024–2026 — Albertsons paid $560,552 for the same category of offense, case after case.
The Big Case
The defining penalty in this profile is a $773.7 million settlement recorded in 2026, issued by a multi-agency enforcement action in the category of off-label or unapproved promotion of medical products. This is the largest single fine in the dataset and accounts for 99.1% of Albertsons’ total penalty burden for the period. The next-largest is a $3.96 million consumer protection settlement from California regulators in 2024, followed by a $1.95 million settlement for employment discrimination recorded in 2025, and a steady accumulation of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) citations for hazardous store conditions.
The Subsidy Flip
While regulators were issuing nearly $781 million in fines, public agencies were simultaneously handing Albertsons $306,723 across two grants in 2024, according to the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker. The top grant totaled $157,228 and a second grant came to $149,495 — both from 2024. The combined sum is a rounding error against the penalty total. But the principle holds: while one arm of government was penalizing Albertsons for breaking the rules, another arm was writing it checks.