The Kroger NOligarchy Profile
A
V
O
I
D
NOligarchy Score
23.7
/ 100
kroger.com
0
Kroger scores 23.55 out of 100 on the NOligarchy Index — a number that tells you almost everything you need to know. On this scale, 100 is a perfect score, meaning zero spending on political influence, zero shareholder extraction, and a spotless legal record. Kroger scored 23.55. The company operates supermarkets and pharmacies across the United States, reported nearly $148 billion in annual revenue, and controls roughly one in six dollars spent at American grocery stores. That kind of scale means every choice Kroger makes — about lobbying, about worker pay, about legal compliance — lands with real weight on real people.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
25.3
Wealth Extraction
35.2
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: 25.28/100. Kroger spent $4.32 million knocking on doors in Washington and channeled an additional $170,400 through its corporate Political Action Committee (PAC) from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). A grade this low means the company’s political footprint is heavy relative to what full accountability would look like.
•
Wealth Extraction Grade: 34.78/100. Kroger handed billions to shareholders through buybacks and dividends while its median employee took home $34,552 a year — and its CEO collected a three-year average package that dwarfs that figure by a factor of 504.
•
Playing by the Rules Grade: 0.0/100. A perfect zero. Kroger accumulated more than $1.6 billion in fines and penalties across 39 cases during the two-year period — the worst compliance record in its sector.
Kroger ranks last — 8th out of 8 — among companies sharing its federal industry classification (Grocery Stores), against a sector average score of 54.8. It is not merely an outlier among its peers. It is in a category of its own. For higher-scoring places to shop in the same sector, see the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: A Company That Chose Shareholders and Lobbyists Over Workers and the Law
Kroger generated nearly $148 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year and used that scale to pursue an unmistakable set of priorities. The company poured $3.584 billion into stock buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2025 alone — money deliberately withheld from a workforce earning a median salary of just $34,552. At the same time, regulators and courts extracted more than $1.6 billion in fines from Kroger, the single largest penalty total among all grocery companies tracked. None of this happened accidentally. Kroger chose, year after year, to reward its largest shareholders, keep its workforce’s paychecks thin, and treat billion-dollar legal settlements as the cost of doing business.
Kroger's $4.5 million in political spending equals 56 years of median-household income — enough people, one per year worked, to fill 0.3 fully-boarded 737s.
Spending to Buy a Seat at the Table
Kroger’s lobbying machine ran without interruption across every quarter of the two-year period. The company reported $4.32 million in federal lobbying expenditures — roughly $11,800 spent every single day to keep its interests in front of Congress and federal agencies. The spending accelerated sharply in 2025, when Kroger deployed $2.03 million compared to $1.3 million in 2024. Lobbyists appeared before the House of Representatives 107 times and the Senate 105 times over the period, while also targeting the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and even the White House Office.
The company’s PAC added $170,400 in direct contributions to federal candidates — split 58.9% to Republicans and 41.1% to Democrats, a deliberate both-sides hedge that maximizes access regardless of which party holds the majority. Kroger executives also made $33,436 in personal political contributions during the same period.
Kroger's PAC gave $62,900 to Democrats and $90,000 to Republicans — a 41.1% / 58.9% split that buys access to whichever party wins.
41.1%
58.9%
Democrats · $62,900
Republicans · $90,000
ACCESS-BUYER PENALTY APPLIED
The issue areas where Kroger’s lobbyists worked hardest reveal exactly which rules the company wants written in its favor. Consumer safety and products topped the list with 24 filings — Kroger runs one of the largest pharmacy networks in the country, and it has a direct financial stake in how data privacy rules, pricing transparency requirements, and online consumer-protection frameworks are written. Filings cited the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) and monitored pricing transparency legislation, signaling active engagement with any framework that could constrain how Kroger collects and uses customer data from its loyalty programs and digital platforms. Lobbyists also tracked the Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act — a bill that, if enacted, would directly restrict Kroger’s pricing latitude at the checkout line.
Agriculture drew 17 filings and labor and antitrust issues 16 — close behind consumer issues at the top of the docket. Health logged another 16 filings. Together these four areas tell a clear story. On health, Kroger’s pharmacies sit directly in the crossfire of pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) reform. Filings repeatedly cited the I CAN Act (referenced 7 times in its House version and 4 times in its Senate form), the Seniors’ Access to Critical Medications Act of 2025, and the Drug Price Transparency in Medicaid Act of 2023. How PBMs reimburse pharmacies directly affects whether Kroger’s pharmacy counters make money or lose it. On labor, filings logged “discussions involving pending business transactions and labor relations” and monitored minimum wage debates — relevant to a company whose workforce numbers in the hundreds of thousands and whose payroll costs are among its largest line items.
Agriculture’s filings focused on the Farm Bill reauthorization and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Kroger accepts SNAP benefits at thousands of locations; the size of those benefits and the eligibility rules that govern them determine a meaningful slice of its customer traffic and revenue. Filings tracked the reconciliation package known informally as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which became law (Public Law No. 119-21), with lobbyists specifically monitoring its agriculture provisions.
On financial regulation, Kroger’s lobbyists consistently monitored credit card interchange and debit routing fees. Swipe fees are one of the largest operating costs for any high-volume retailer; every basis point that Visa and Mastercard charge flows directly from Kroger’s margins. The Credit Card Competition Act appeared across multiple quarters of filings under both the financial institutions and banking issue areas.
Four of Kroger’s 21 registered lobbyists are former government insiders — people who built careers inside the halls of power before crossing to the private sector. Among them: David Schnittger, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Speaker John Boehner from 2006 to 2015; Thomas Andrews, who held senior advisory roles to Speaker Boehner, Speaker Paul Ryan, and the White House legislative affairs office through 2021; Caren Street, whose résumé spans Senator Harry Reid’s office, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and Representative Karen Bass’s office; and Mike Mullen, a former legislative aide to Representative Mike Doyle. These are not random hires — they are people whose value to Kroger is measured in phone calls that get answered.
Kroger retained 2 outside lobbying firms to amplify its reach across the two-year period.
Billions for Shareholders, $34,552 for the Median Worker
Kroger’s CEO pay ratio is 504:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, per the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $17.4 million. The median Kroger employee — the cashier, the stock clerk, the deli worker — took home $34,552 over the same year. That is $663 a week before taxes. Kroger’s chief executive collected, on average, 504 times that amount.
The Shareholder Payout: In fiscal year 2025 alone, Kroger spent $2.699 billion buying back its own stock and paid out $885 million in dividends — a combined $3.584 billion funneled to capital owners in a single year. The buybacks represent a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. That mechanism benefits the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of all stock market wealth.
The Missed Raise: Kroger’s SEC proxy filing does not disclose a total employee headcount, which means a precise per-worker calculation cannot be made. What can be said plainly is this: $2.699 billion in buybacks in a single fiscal year, deployed at a company whose median worker earns $34,552, represents a structural choice to enrich shareholders at a scale that dwarfs the earnings of the people who run the registers and stock the shelves.
The Dividend Factor: Kroger did not abandon traditional dividends in favor of buybacks — it ran both simultaneously. The company paid $885 million in dividends in fiscal 2025, up from $796 million in fiscal 2024, and dividends climbed every year on record. Running buybacks and dividends in parallel means Kroger is not choosing between two types of investor reward — it is maximizing both, simultaneously, while its workforce’s median earnings sit just above the poverty line for a family of four.
Executive Bonuses: The buyback mechanism and the CEO pay ratio are not unrelated. When Kroger buys back its own shares, the total count of outstanding shares falls, and Earnings Per Share (EPS) rises automatically — even if the company’s underlying profits do not change. EPS is a standard metric embedded in executive compensation formulas. The same executives who approved the buyback programs collect bonuses triggered by the EPS increases those programs create.
$1.61 Billion in Fines, and Still Collecting Public Money
Kroger’s legal record during the two-year tracking period is not a collection of isolated missteps. It is a pattern. The company racked up 39 documented violations — covering off-label pharmaceutical promotion, air pollution, wage theft, consumer protection breaches, workplace safety failures, discrimination, environmental violations, and more. Total penalties reached $1,608,416,943 — over one and a half billion dollars. That places Kroger first in its sector for total fines, the single worst compliance record among all Grocery Stores companies tracked.
EXHIBIT — WOOLLY MAMMOTH · ~20,000 YEARS AGO
Photo: Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0
19,953 years of a median household’s income
Worked off at the median household income, Kroger's $1.61 billion in penalties equals 19,953 years — labor reaching back to Ice Age megafauna.
The Pattern: The largest category by far was off-label or unapproved promotion of medical products, which generated $1.48 billion across just 2 cases — roughly 92% of Kroger’s entire penalty total, a concentration that points directly at its pharmacy operations. But the pattern extends well beyond pharmaceuticals: air pollution penalties totaling more than $102 million across three cases, 24 separate workplace safety violations, wage and hour settlements, a consumer protection case, and environmental and asbestos citations paint a company whose compliance culture failed across multiple business lines at the same time, over the two-year tracking period.
The Big Case: The largest single penalty was a $1.37 billion multi-agency settlement in 2024 for off-label or unapproved promotion of medical products. A coalition of state attorneys general brought the case. To put that in perspective: $1.37 billion is roughly what Kroger spent on dividends in both fiscal years 2024 and 2025 combined. The following year, Kroger paid an additional $110 million to Kentucky’s attorney general for related conduct. In 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) extracted $102.5 million in an air pollution settlement — a new category of liability that demonstrates Kroger’s regulatory exposure is widening, not narrowing. On the labor front, a federal class-action lawsuit resulted in a $20.88 million wage and hour settlement in 2025 — meaning workers were allegedly shortchanged on their paychecks by a company whose CEO collects 504 times the median worker’s salary.
The Subsidy Flip: While regulators were levying those fines, local and state governments were simultaneously handing Kroger public money. Between 2024 and 2025, Kroger collected $21,792,371 in government grants and subsidies across 12 awards. The two largest came in 2025 — $12 million and $5 million from the same public entity — followed by additional awards totaling more than $4.7 million from other governments. The same company that paid $1.61 billion in penalties for breaking the rules accepted $21.8 million from taxpayers as a reward for showing up.