The Books-A-Million NOligarchy Profile
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Books-A-Million earns a NOligarchy Score of 72.93 out of 100 — well below where its sector peers cluster. The company continues to spend nothing on lobbyists, runs no Political Action Committee (PAC), and maintains one of the quietest federal footprints of any national book retailer. What holds the score down is a 2024 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) workplace safety citation that remains on the public docket, and a pay structure that stays entirely off the public ledger.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
97.3
Wealth Extraction
58.2
Playing by the Rules
33.4
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: 97.31/100. Books-A-Million filed no federal lobbying activity and operated no PAC from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). A single executive donation to a federal candidate — $400 in total — is the only fingerprint left in Washington.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 58.49/100. Books-A-Million is a private company with no obligation to disclose executive compensation or shareholder payout activity. The pay gap between leadership and frontline workers is estimated to be severe, and the public has no way to verify or challenge it.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 33.36/100. One OSHA workplace safety violation in 2024, carrying a penalty of $20,205, sits on the public docket — enough to rank the company 14th out of 15 in its sector on compliance.
Books-A-Million ranks 14th out of 15 companies in the Book retailers and news dealers federal industry classification. The sector average score is 83.5 — Books-A-Million trails that benchmark by more than 10 points. Only one company in the entire classification scores lower.
The Bottom Line: A Safety Fine and a Pay Structure the Public Can’t See
Books-A-Million’s posture of restraint — no lobbyists, no PAC, no public subsidies — remains intact. But the company’s last publicly reported annual revenue of $474 million, recorded before it went private in 2015, reflects the scale of an operation that employs hundreds of hourly workers across physical retail locations. In 2024, one of those locations generated an OSHA workplace safety citation and a $20,205 fine — a figure that barely registers against the company’s revenues but confirms that safety conditions failed a federal inspection. Compounding that, Books-A-Million’s compensation structure is entirely off the public ledger: no disclosed CEO pay ratio, no buyback filings, no dividend records. The people staffing those locations have no public benchmark to judge whether their take-home pay reflects even a fraction of the company’s output.
No Footprint in Washington
For a retailer with locations spread across the American South and beyond, Books-A-Million has chosen an almost invisible federal presence. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database shows zero lobbying expenditure across the full two-year period — no retained lobbying firms, no in-house lobbyists registered, no issue areas filed, no bills cited. There is no record of any former government official hired to work the corridors of Congress on the company’s behalf.
The only federal political trail is $400 in individual executive donations recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — a single contribution logged in Q3 2024. The company ran no PAC and channeled nothing through a partisan political organization during this period.
This is genuinely unusual. Book retailers have real policy stakes — sales tax treatment of physical versus digital media, postal rates that affect delivery competitors, minimum wage legislation that directly hits hourly retail staff — yet Books-A-Million chose to let those fights play out in Washington without its voice in the room.
An Undisclosed Pay Gap
Books-A-Million’s CEO pay ratio is not publicly disclosed. Because the company went private, it faces no obligation to file the pay ratio disclosures that the Securities and Exchange Commission mandates from public companies. The best available figure is 182:1, based on AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch industry benchmarks for comparable companies in this sector, per AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch. That estimate suggests the person at the top of this organization earns roughly 182 times what the average frontline bookseller takes home — but without a public filing, neither workers nor the public can confirm or contest it.
No stock buyback or dividend data is recorded for Books-A-Million. As a private company, it has no publicly traded shares and no obligation to report distributions to its owners — leaving the question of what the company’s stakeholders extracted from the business entirely unanswerable from public sources.
A Safety Citation That Lingers on the Docket
Over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, Books-A-Million accumulated one recorded regulatory violation — a single OSHA workplace safety citation issued in 2024. The penalty came to $20,205, recorded by Good Jobs First. One case does not establish a pattern, but it establishes a fact: safety conditions at one company location failed a federal inspection. For hourly workers in physical retail — where lifting, equipment use, and crowded stockrooms create real physical exposure — that is not an abstract data point.
This is the median American household.
Two earners, a kid, a dog, $80,610 a year — the exact middle of the country (U.S. Census).
NOTICE OF PENALTY — HOUSEHOLD SCALE
ISSUED TO
the median U.S. household
BASIS
0.0043% of annual income
$3.44
the same share of income that $20,205 in penalties takes of the company’s revenue
Books-A-Million's $20,205 in regulatory penalties is 0.0043% of its revenue — for a median household, the same bite as a $3.44 ticket.
No public subsidies appear in the record. Books-A-Million has not collected the kind of state and local economic development grants, tax increment financing deals, or job-creation credits that many retail peers have pocketed from municipal governments eager to attract or retain employers.