The Macy’s NOligarchy Profile
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Macy’s earns a NOligarchy Score of 79.76 out of 100 — a number that looks measured at first glance but conceals a significant imbalance: a company pulling in nearly $22 billion in annual revenue that quietly channels hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders while the median worker takes home less than $40,000 a year.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
97.0
Wealth Extraction
40.9
Playing by the Rules
90.0
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.
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Political Access Grade: 96.99/100. Macy’s ran no federal lobbying operation and made no Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). The only political money that moved came from individual executive personal donations — a total of $937 across the period — leaving almost no institutional fingerprint on Washington.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 40.32/100. The lowest-scoring pillar by a wide margin, driven by a CEO pay ratio of 368:1 and a pattern of stock buybacks that, even in a quieter period, consumed $251 million that could have gone directly to the company’s roughly 86,000 workers.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 90.0/100. No recorded fines and no recorded violations, but the public record does show $3 million in government subsidies awarded to Macy’s across 2024 and 2025 — public money flowing toward a company dominant in its sector.
Macy’s ranks 3rd out of 7 companies in the Department Stores sector, with a score of 79.76 against a sector average of 73.4. The score edges above the industry average, though the wealth extraction pillar remains the persistent drag pulling it down relative to the top of the group.
The Bottom Line: Wall Street Gets Hundreds of Millions; Workers Get Less Than $40K
Macy’s generated $21.76 billion in annual revenue — enough to rank as the dominant player in the Department Stores market — yet the median Macy’s employee took home $38,296 last year, less than many Americans pay in rent. Over the same stretch, the company handed $251 million to shareholders through buybacks across the last two fiscal years and $197 million in dividends in fiscal year 2025 alone. The company filed zero lobbying disclosures and racked up zero regulatory penalties, so the story here isn’t about political maneuvering or a pattern of lawbreaking. It is simpler and starker than that: Macy’s chose, repeatedly, to route enormous sums toward investors while leaving its frontline workforce — tens of thousands of people working department store floors — at subsistence-level paychecks. Meanwhile, the same company collected more than $3 million in public subsidies over 2024 and 2025, courtesy of American taxpayers.
No Footprint in Washington
Macy’s is conspicuously absent from the federal influence landscape. According to Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings, the company spent nothing on federal lobbying during the two-year tracking period — no retained lobbyists, no external firms, no issue areas on record. It ran no PAC, and no PAC contributions are recorded.
The only political money that moved at all came from individual executive personal donations — a combined $937 tracked by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) across eight quarters, spread across Q4 2024 and Q1 2026. These are personal choices by individual executives, not a coordinated company strategy.
There are no revolving-door hires on record, no former government insiders brought in to work the corridors of Capitol Hill, no bills cited in LDA filings. For a company commanding 33.44% of the Department Stores market, the absence of any institutional political infrastructure is genuinely notable. What the record does show is a company that, at least in this period, chose not to spend corporate money purchasing Washington access.
A CEO Paid 368 Times What the Person at the Register Earns
The CEO-to-worker pay gap at Macy’s is the sharpest number in this profile. According to the SEC DEF 14A, the CEO pay ratio is 368:1 — meaning Macy’s chief executive collected compensation at 368 times the median employee’s salary. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $14.1 million, while the median employee earned $38,296.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 86K employees
Spent on buybacks
$251.0M
directed to shareholders
÷ 86K
workers
Per-worker raise
$2,926
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 4% annual raise on the median worker's $38,296 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
Those 85,792 workers also found themselves on the short end of the company’s cash decisions. Macy’s spent $250 million on stock buybacks in fiscal year 2025 — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — plus $1 million in fiscal year 2024, bringing the two-year total to $251 million. On top of that, the company paid out $197 million in dividends in fiscal year 2025 and $192 million in fiscal year 2024. Those dividend payments flow overwhelmingly to the wealthiest Americans: the top 10% of earners own 93% of the stock market.
The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 85,792 workers a $2,925.68 raise, spread across the last two fiscal years.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 85,792
Your share of the buyback
+$2,926
Per biweekly paycheck
+$56.26
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $251 million.
Spread across Macy's's 85,792 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $2,926 per worker — about $56 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $1,462.84 annual raise the company chose not to give. A store associate earning the median $38,296 would have seen a meaningful lift in their paycheck. Instead, that money went to reducing the share count — a move that boosts Earnings Per Share (EPS), a metric directly tied to the kind of executive performance bonuses that helped deliver $14.1 million to the CEO.
It is worth noting that Macy’s did not abandon traditional dividends in favor of concentrating all returns in buybacks. The company maintained substantial dividend payouts alongside buybacks — $192 million in fiscal year 2024 rising to $197 million in fiscal year 2025. That means Macy’s ran both channels simultaneously: paying growing dividends to investors while also deploying buybacks that disproportionately reward insiders and large institutional holders who can time their exits. Frontline workers participated in neither.
No Fines, But Public Money on the Books
Macy’s carries no recorded regulatory fines and no violations from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. On the compliance side of the public ledger, the record is clean.
But the public record is not entirely empty. According to Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker, Macy’s collected $3,017,617 in government subsidies across 10 grants in 2024 and 2025 — public money awarded to a company that simultaneously channeled $251 million to shareholders. The single largest grant, worth $1,659,031, was awarded in 2024 in Oklahoma. This two-year snapshot represents a fraction of Macy’s full history on the subsidy tracker; the public record there runs deeper than this period alone.
EXHIBIT — ONE TEACHER-YEAR AT A TIME
42 years of an average teacher’s salary
The $3 million in public subsidies Macy's collected would fund 42 years of an average teacher's salary.
A score of 90 on this pillar reflects the weight of that public support. A clean fine record is the baseline expectation for any corporation — not a trophy. What the data adds here is a picture of a dominant retailer benefiting from taxpayer-funded assistance at the same time it chose to route a quarter-billion dollars away from its own workforce.