The Bass Pro Shops NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score
54.7
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Bass Pro Shops earns a NOligarchy Score of 54.67 out of 100 — for a company pulling in $7.36 billion a year in annual revenue, the scorecard tells a sharp story: a near-clean political record collides with a wealth-extraction pillar anchored by an industry-estimated CEO pay gap of 1,122-to-one, and a compliance record that produced nearly $5 million in penalties in the same years the company collected more than $5 million in government subsidies.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
93.1
Wealth Extraction
26.1
Playing by the Rules
8.2
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.
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Political Access Grade: 93.13/100. Bass Pro Shops filed zero federal lobbying disclosures and runs no corporate Political Action Committee (PAC). The only traceable political activity is personal: executives whose employer is listed as Bass Pro Shops channeled $200,000 in individual contributions directly to federal candidates and committees from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period).
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 26.11/100. This pillar drives the overall score down hardest. Bass Pro Shops is private and discloses nothing about executive compensation, owner distributions, or worker pay. The best available benchmark puts the CEO-to-median-worker pay gap at an industry-estimated 1,122-to-one — a figure that reflects sector norms, not a confirmed internal number, but one that signals the potential scale of what the private structure conceals.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 8.12/100. Two regulatory cases — totaling $4,956,354 in penalties — were recorded in 2025. The bulk of that came from a single $4.95 million benefit-plan lawsuit settlement. For a $7.36 billion company, the dollar amount is small relative to revenue; as a compliance signal, it is a significant one.
Bass Pro Shops ranks 18th out of 22 companies in the federal industry classification for sporting goods, hobby, and musical instrument retailers, where the sector average score is 68.3. Bass Pro Shops sits nearly 14 points below that average — trailing the typical company in its sector by a wide margin, pulled down primarily by its wealth-extraction and compliance records. Because Bass Pro Shops scores below 50 on wealth extraction, readers looking for higher-scoring options in this category can find them in the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: A Hidden Pay Divide, a Benefit-Plan Settlement, and Public Money on Top
Bass Pro Shops is a $7.36 billion outdoor-retail empire that answers to no stock exchange, no quarterly earnings call, and no shareholder demanding transparency. What the public record does show is this: in the same stretch that it quietly collected more than $5.3 million in government subsidies, it also settled a federal lawsuit over employee benefit-plan administration for $4.95 million. Those two figures very nearly cancel each other on a ledger — but the books behind them stay firmly shut. Industry benchmarks suggest the gap between what the person running the company earns and what the person stocking the fishing-lure aisle takes home could be as wide as 1,122-to-one. That number is an estimate precisely because Bass Pro Shops is never required to confirm or deny it.
No Footprint in Washington — But Executives Write Checks
Bass Pro Shops spent exactly nothing on federal lobbying during the two-year period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, and it operates no corporate PAC. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database shows no filings, no registered lobbyists, no issue areas, and no bills cited. For a company with $7.36 billion in annual revenue competing against publicly traded peers who collectively pour millions into Capitol Hill access, this is a genuinely unusual posture.
No revolving-door hires appear in the record: zero former government officials were brought on as in-house lobbyists or influence operatives during this period.
What does appear is personal political giving. Individuals who listed Bass Pro Shops as their employer donated a combined $200,000 to federal candidates and committees according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records — $100,000 in the third quarter of 2025 and another $100,000 in the fourth quarter of that year. These are individual contributions, not corporate PAC spending, and they reflect personal choices by the executives who made them. But two back-to-back six-figure checks are the kind of donations that get a donor’s calls returned.
The absence of a corporate lobbying apparatus does not mean Bass Pro Shops is without political leverage. A company with $7.36 billion in annual sales spread across rural and small-town America — the geographic heartland of hunting, fishing, and outdoor culture — carries implicit influence without ever filing a single LDA disclosure. Politicians in those districts know who the major employer is. That structural reality does not show up in any database, but it is a form of access that money alone cannot fully replicate.
A 1,122-to-One Pay Gap Hidden Behind a Private Wall
Because Bass Pro Shops is structured as a private company, it is not required to file proxy statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission, not required to report executive compensation, and not required to disclose what it returns to its owners. Bass Pro Shops’ CEO pay ratio is not publicly disclosed. The best available figure is 1,122:1, based on AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch industry benchmarks for comparable companies in this sector, according to AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch. That is a benchmark derived from what comparable public-company executives in this industry earn relative to their median workers — not a confirmed internal figure. But as an order of magnitude, it describes a world in which the person at the top of the organization earns more in a single workday than many frontline associates take home in a year.
No stock buyback or dividend data is recorded for the two-year period. That absence does not mean those payments did not happen — it means the public record cannot see them. A company generating $7.36 billion in annual sales has enormous discretion over how it divides its returns between ownership and labor, and it faces no public reporting requirement that would let workers, policymakers, or the press evaluate that division.
A $5 Million Settlement and a Taxpayer Subsidy in the Same Year
Bass Pro Shops recorded two regulatory cases totaling $4,956,354 in penalties in 2025 — a figure modest against $7.36 billion in annual revenue but meaningful as a compliance signal. The record shows two distinct problem areas: benefit plan administration generated one case that dwarfs everything else, while workplace safety produced a separate Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) citation.
The dominant case is the $4,950,000 settlement reached in 2025, resolved through a private federal lawsuit over benefit plan administration — meaning the company was found liable for how it managed the retirement or health benefits its employees were promised. The second case is a $6,354 OSHA workplace safety citation from 2025. These two cases represent what is visible in the public record for this two-year window; the source site carries the company’s fuller historical docket.
The subsidy picture makes the compliance record harder to read cleanly. While regulators were extracting penalties, governments were simultaneously handing Bass Pro Shops public money. The company collected $5,375,460 in subsidies across five grants in 2024 and 2025. The single largest award — $4,931,348 in 2024 — accounts for the overwhelming majority of that total. A company generating $7.36 billion in annual revenue accepted public funds that, in aggregate, exceed the fines it paid out.
$5.4 million
taxpayer subsidies
$5 million
regulatory fines
1.1:1
Bass Pro Shops collected $5.4 million in taxpayer subsidies against $5 million in regulatory fines — 1.1 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties.