The Crate & Barrel NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score
63.5
/ 100
crateandbarrel.com
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Ranked in
Furniture & Home Decor
#5
Subsidiary of Otto Group / Otto GmbH & Co KG
Crate & Barrel earns a NOligarchy Score of 62.86 out of 100 — a result anchored low by a $2.42 million privacy violation settlement that defines the company’s public enforcement record. The score has moved only marginally since that penalty first appeared. The company still registers no institutional footprint in Washington and, as a privately held business, keeps its executive compensation and owner distributions entirely out of public view. That combination — quiet on influence, opaque on wealth, and carrying a sizable legal penalty — defines what the data can and cannot tell us.
Current Pillar Scores
Otto Group / Otto GmbH & Co KG (parent company) has no federal lobbying or PAC spending of its own — Political Access reflects this company's own filings only. Wealth Extraction and Playing by the Rules reflect this company directly.
Political Access
95.8
Wealth Extraction
48.9
Playing by the Rules
6.1
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: 95.6/100. Crate & Barrel filed zero federal lobbying disclosures and operated no Political Action Committee (PAC) from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). A small number of individuals tied to the company made modest personal contributions to federal candidates totaling $2,912, but the company itself registered no institutional presence in Washington.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 48.54/100. This score reflects a disclosure problem more than a proven harm. Because the company is private, neither buyback activity nor dividend distributions are part of the public record. The one figure that surfaces — an estimated CEO pay ratio — signals a meaningful gap between the executive suite and the sales floor, but it cannot be verified against any public filing.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 4.27/100. This remains the weakest score of the three. A $2.42 million privacy violation settlement — resolved through a private state-level lawsuit in 2024 — sits as the only entry on the public enforcement docket, and it is enough to place Crate & Barrel near the bottom of its sector on compliance.
Crate & Barrel ranks 7th out of 9 in the Furniture and home furnishings retailers sector, against a sector average score of 73.7. At 62.86, the company trails that average, meaning it falls below the industry standard among its tracked peers — largely because the privacy penalty hits harder on the Playing by the Rules pillar than most competitors’ records have.
The Bottom Line: A Privacy Settlement That Defines the Record
The single sharpest finding in Crate & Barrel’s current profile is a $2.42 million privacy violation resolved through a state-level private lawsuit in 2024 — the only penalty on the public docket, but large enough to crater the company’s compliance score. Against reported annual revenue of approximately $2 billion, $2.42 million is a sum the company can absorb without flinching — roughly twelve cents per hundred dollars in sales. What it reveals is a consumer-data practice serious enough to generate legal action. Meanwhile, because Crate & Barrel is privately held, the public has no mechanism to see what the company pays its executives relative to its frontline workers, or what its owners extracted from the business over the same period the settlement was being resolved.
No Footprint in Washington
For the full stretch from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, Crate & Barrel spent nothing on federal lobbying — zero filings under the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), no issue areas registered, no bills cited, no government agencies targeted. It hired no outside lobbying firms and deployed no in-house lobbyists. It ran no PAC and directed no corporate funds toward federal candidates through any institutional vehicle tracked by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
What the public record does show is a handful of small personal donations — five separate contributions from individuals affiliated with Crate & Barrel, totaling $2,912 across Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. That is personal-scale civic participation, not a corporation engineering access to lawmakers.
No revolving-door hires are on record. No former congressional staffers or agency officials appear on the payroll in a government-relations capacity. For a company of Crate & Barrel’s scale — a national furniture and home goods retailer — this level of political restraint is notable. Retailers of comparable size routinely lobby on trade tariffs, import rules, consumer product safety standards, and labor regulations. Crate & Barrel, at least publicly, chose not to play that game.
An Undisclosed Pay Gap in a Private Company
The most honest thing to say about Crate & Barrel’s wealth extraction picture is that most of it cannot be seen. The company is not publicly traded, which means it files no proxy statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), publishes no annual report to shareholders, and discloses no buyback or dividend activity to any public body.
What the data does offer is a benchmark estimate. The CEO pay ratio is 307:1, based on AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch industry benchmarks for comparable companies in this sector. In plain terms: for every dollar a typical Crate & Barrel worker earns in a year, the person at the top is estimated to take home 307 times as much. No stock buyback data and no dividend distributions appear in any public filing, because none are required — and that absence does not mean owners received nothing; it means there is no mechanism to find out.
A Privacy Settlement Breaks a Clean Record
Over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, Crate & Barrel accumulated one recorded violation — and it is the only penalty in the company’s public enforcement file. A privacy violation resolved through a state-level private lawsuit in 2024 produced a $2,420,000 penalty. One case is not a pattern of conduct, but it is a data point that matters: the settlement is large enough to rank Crate & Barrel first among the nine tracked companies in the Furniture and home furnishings retailers sector on total enforcement exposure.
Against approximately $2 billion in annual revenue, $2.42 million represents roughly one-tenth of one percent of the company’s sales — a sum that functions, in practice, as a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent.
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
0.1% of annual income
$78.03
the same share of income that $2.4 million in penalties takes of the company’s revenue
Crate & Barrel's $2.4 million in regulatory penalties is 0.1% of its revenue — for a median household, the same bite as a $78.03 ticket.
The nature of the lawsuit points specifically to how the company handled consumer data, though the precise underlying conduct is not specified in the public record. No government grants, tax credits, or economic development subsidies appear on file. Crate & Barrel has not been documented as a recipient of the kind of public incentives that many large retailers collect when they open new locations or expand operations.