The Costco NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score
69.0
/ 100
costco.com
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NOligarchy Score: 68.23 out of 100.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
94.7
Wealth Extraction
54.5
Playing by the Rules
26.5
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.
Costco’s score reflects a company that has made deliberate choices across three dimensions of corporate power — largely opting out of the Washington influence game, quietly extracting enormous value for shareholders and executives, and racking up a string of regulatory penalties despite its carefully cultivated reputation as one of America’s more worker-friendly retailers.
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Political Access Grade: 94.74/100. Costco filed zero federal lobbying reports and ran no Political Action Committee (PAC) during Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). That near-perfect score reflects a genuine absence from the formal influence machine, though individual Costco executives did make modest personal contributions to federal campaigns.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 53.98/100. This middling grade reflects a company that channeled over $1.6 billion into stock buybacks across its two most recently reported fiscal years — on top of billions more in dividends — while its CEO collected compensation averaging more than 300 times what the typical Costco worker took home.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 23.52/100. This low score reflects $9,151,665 in fines and penalties recorded across 14 cases spanning 2024 through 2026, covering consumer protection, environmental, wage, and workplace safety violations — a pattern that sits well below what a company of Costco’s size and reputation should be able to sustain.
Costco ranks 7th out of 21 companies in the Warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other general merchandise retailers sector. The sector average score is 54.0, and Costco’s 68.23 places it above that midpoint — but that lead is built almost entirely on its political restraint. On the dimensions that touch workers and the law, Costco tracks closer to the sector’s more troubled players.
The Bottom Line: A Clean Lobbying Record Can’t Paper Over a $9.2 Million Fine Tab and a 316-to-1 Pay Gap
Costco earned $275.2 billion in annual revenue — enough money that if laid end to end in dollar bills it would circle the Earth more than a thousand times — yet it handed $868,128 to workers who were shorted on earnings only after California regulators forced the issue, paid $5 million to settle a consumer protection lawsuit, and watched the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) extract another $3 million for environmental violations. At the same time, the company funneled $903 million into stock buybacks in its most recent fiscal year alone — money that went not to the warehouse floor but to a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. The sharpest imbalance here is not what Costco spends in Washington — it spends nothing — but what it chose to do with its extraordinary cash flows: prioritize shareholders and top executives over the workers who stock the shelves, and treat regulatory penalties as a manageable line item on a $275 billion income statement.
No Footprint in Washington
Of Costco’s three pillar grades, Political Access is the one bright spot with no ambiguity. Costco filed no lobbying disclosures under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) and operated no PAC during the two-year period, as confirmed by Senate LDA records. The company’s lobbyist headcount was zero, it hired no outside lobbying firms, and it sent no one through Washington’s revolving door. For a company pulling in over a quarter of a trillion dollars in annual global sales, that restraint is genuinely notable. Its U.S. operations generated $200.9 billion in revenue, representing 14.49% of the warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other general merchandise retail market — and yet it chose not to leverage that footprint into formal political influence.
What exists in the political record is modest: individual Costco executives made personal donations totaling $10,268 to federal candidates and committees across the two-year period, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. These are personal contributions, not corporate PAC money, and they are small enough — the largest single-quarter cluster reached roughly $8,178 — that they represent executive preferences rather than a coordinated corporate influence strategy.
The absence of any lobbying activity also means there are no issue areas, no bill references, and no government officials on record as having been lobbied on Costco’s behalf. For a company this size, operating in a sector deeply affected by trade policy, labor law, food safety regulation, and environmental compliance, that is a genuine choice — and it stands in sharp contrast to most of its sector peers.
Wall Street First, Warehouse Workers Second
Costco’s CEO pay ratio is 316:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the SEC DEF 14A. Put that in human terms: for every dollar the median Costco worker earned — about $49,186 a year, roughly the salary of an entry-level teacher or a first-year firefighter — Costco’s chief executive collected $316. The CEO’s three-year average package came to about $15.6 million. That is not a market inevitability; it is the outcome of intentional decisions made by a compensation committee that chose those numbers.
The Shareholder Payout
Over the two most recently reported fiscal years, Costco poured $903 million into stock buybacks in fiscal year 2025 and $700 million in fiscal year 2024, totaling $1.603 billion, according to SEC 10-K filings. Every dollar spent on buybacks was channeled toward a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — a mechanism that disproportionately rewards the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of the stock market.
On top of that, Costco paid out $2.183 billion in regular dividends in fiscal year 2025 and $9.041 billion in fiscal year 2024 — that latter figure a massive special dividend — per the same SEC 10-K filings. The fiscal year 2024 special dividend alone — $9 billion in a single payout — is more than the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of several small nations. It flowed overwhelmingly to large institutional shareholders and insiders who held the stock at payout time.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 324K employees
Spent on buybacks
$1.6B
directed to shareholders
÷ 324K
workers
Per-worker raise
$4,951
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 5% annual raise on the median worker's $49,186 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
The Missed Raise
The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 323,800 workers a $4,950.59 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $2,475.30 annual raise the company chose not to give.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 323,800
Your share of the buyback
+$4,951
Per biweekly paycheck
+$95.2
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $1.6 billion.
Spread across Costco's 323,800 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $4,951 per worker — about $95 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
The Dividend Factor
Costco did not abandon traditional investor payouts in favor of buybacks — it did both, simultaneously and at enormous scale. The company paid out billions in dividends while also spending over $1.6 billion on buybacks across two fiscal years. The data shows they did not have to choose between their investors and their workforce; they could have paid shareholders through traditional dividends and still funded a meaningful worker raise. They simply chose not to.
Executive Bonuses
The mechanism matters: when Costco spends $903 million buying back its own stock, it reduces the number of shares in circulation. Fewer shares means each remaining share claims a larger slice of reported earnings — a metric known as Earnings Per Share (EPS). EPS is directly embedded in many executive compensation formulas. The same executives who approved the buyback program are the ones whose bonuses rise when EPS climbs. With a CEO collecting pay 316 times the median worker’s salary, that loop — authorize buybacks, watch EPS rise, collect performance bonus — is not hypothetical. It is built into the compensation structure the board chose.
$9.2 Million in Penalties, Collected Across a Two-Year Paper Trail
Costco’s “good employer” brand is real in some dimensions — above-average wages, decent benefits — but the public regulatory record tells a more complicated story. Across 14 cases over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, regulators and courts extracted a total of $9,151,665 in fines and penalties from Costco, according to Good Jobs First. That figure sounds substantial in isolation, but against $275 billion in annual revenue it amounts to roughly three ten-thousandths of one percent of sales. At that scale, the fine is not a deterrent; it is a rounding error.
The Pattern
The single largest offense category was consumer protection violations, which generated $5,000,000 in a single federal lawsuit. Consumer protection infractions at a retailer of Costco’s reach — which sells food, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and financial products to tens of millions of members — are not abstract regulatory technicalities. They reflect failures that touched real customers. Environmental violations accounted for $3,066,724 in a separate EPA enforcement action. Wage and hour violations — where workers were directly shorted on paychecks — added $878,128 across two cases. Seven separate workplace safety or health citations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) added another $145,013. Seven distinct offense categories spanning 14 cases from 2024 through 2026 is not a random cluster of one-off accidents. It is a pattern.
The Big Case
The largest single penalty was a $5,000,000 settlement in 2024, extracted through a federal private lawsuit for consumer protection violations. That case alone accounts for more than half of Costco’s total penalty bill for the two-year span.
The EPA action in 2025 generated a $3,066,724 penalty for environmental violations. On the wage front, California’s Labor Commissioner’s Office extracted $868,128 in 2025 for wage and hour violations — meaning workers who had already earned that money were waiting on paychecks a $275 billion company could have written without noticing the line item.
The Subsidy Flip
While regulators were penalizing Costco for breaking rules, state and local governments were simultaneously handing it $40,085,545 in public subsidies across 23 grants and tax arrangements in 2024–2025, per Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker. The largest single grant — $8,000,000 in 2025 — was followed by a $6,502,544 award in 2024 and a $6,300,000 award also in 2025. The public subsidies exceeded the total fine bill by more than four to one — meaning taxpayers, in net terms, paid Costco to operate in their communities even as regulators were documenting harm to those same communities’ residents.
$40.1 million
taxpayer subsidies
$9.2 million
regulatory fines
4.4:1
Costco collected $40.1 million in taxpayer subsidies against $9.2 million in regulatory fines — 4.4 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties.