The Petco NOligarchy Profile
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Petco earns a NOligarchy Score of 66.68 out of 100 — a middling mark that masks a serious internal imbalance. The score is dragged down almost entirely by one pillar: the gap between what the CEO pockets and what the people keeping the shelves stocked take home. On Washington influence and shareholder payouts, Petco keeps a relatively clean slate. On paying its workforce fairly relative to the top, it fails.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
100.0
Wealth Extraction
40.6
Playing by the Rules
27.6
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: 100/100. Petco filed no federal lobbying disclosures, ran no Political Action Committee (PAC), and recorded no executive campaign contributions during the tracking period. That perfect score reflects a complete absence of organized spending to shape legislation.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 40.65/100. This is where the profile breaks down. No buybacks or dividends were recorded — so this grade is not about shareholder payouts. It is about a CEO-to-worker pay gap that stretches to 397-to-one, which single-handedly crushes the score for this pillar.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 27.27/100. Six regulatory violations across 2024–2025, covering wage theft, workplace safety failures, and air pollution — adding up to $416,089 in penalties. That is the worst compliance record in its sector peer group.
Petco ranks 3rd out of 5 companies in the Other miscellaneous retailers sector. The sector average score is 72.3 — Petco trails that benchmark by more than 5 points, making it an accountability outlier among its retail peers. Because Petco scores below 50, readers can find higher-scoring alternatives in the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: A $15 Million CEO Payday Standing Atop a $37,000 Workforce
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the full two-year tracking period — Petco’s sharpest imbalance is not political spending or Wall Street payouts. It is the distance between the boardroom and the break room. The company generated nearly $6 billion in annual revenue, yet its median employee earned $37,453 for the year — less than what many Americans spend on rent alone in major cities. At the same time, the executive at the top received compensation averaging nearly $15 million a year. Petco chose to widen that gap while racking up six regulatory violations for underpaying workers and exposing them to unsafe conditions. The math is not complicated: the people caring for the animals and running the registers are not sharing in the company’s scale.
No Footprint in Washington
Petco spent nothing on federal lobbying during the two-year tracking period, retained no outside lobbying firms, and operated no PAC. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) shows a blank filing history. No revolving-door hires — former government officials brought on to exploit their connections — appear in the record. Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show no individual campaign contributions from Petco executives during the period either. On political access, Petco is genuinely quiet.
EXHIBIT — THE RESERVED SEAT
$0 in lobbying · $0 in PAC money
Petco filed no federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC in this window — the reserved seat at the witness table sits empty.
A 397-to-One Pay Gap That Needs No Wall Street Assist
No stock buybacks were recorded for Petco in fiscal year 2025, and the company paid no dividends. There is no shareholder payout machinery to dissect here. What remains is something more straightforward and more damaging: a CEO-to-worker compensation ratio so extreme it stands on its own.
Petco’s CEO pay ratio is 397:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the company’s own SEC DEF 14A filing. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $14.9 million. The median Petco employee earned $37,453 — a salary so thin that a single month’s delay in a paycheck could put a worker behind on rent.
To put the gap in human terms: for every dollar a typical Petco worker brought home, the person at the top collected $397. That is not a rounding error or an artifact of a one-time bonus. It is a persistent structural choice about whose labor the company values — and at what price.
Because Petco recorded no buybacks and paid no dividends, there is no per-worker raise calculation to run and no shareholder yield to contrast against employee earnings. The absence of those mechanisms does not soften the picture. The company — pulling in nearly $6 billion in annual revenue, representing 12.52% of the Other miscellaneous retailers market — chose to concentrate executive rewards at the top while keeping its 29,646-person workforce at a median salary that falls well below a comfortable living in most of the cities where Petco operates.
Fines for the Workforce, Not Just the Rulebook
Petco’s compliance record across 2024 and 2025 produced six violations and $416,089 in total penalties — the heaviest fine total among all five companies tracked in the Other miscellaneous retailers sector. These figures cover the two-year period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026; the source site carries the company’s full historical record beyond this window.
Wage theft leads the offense list. One wage and hour violation alone accounted for $315,000 — more than three-quarters of every penalty dollar Petco paid across the entire period. That case came in 2025, when New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection handed Petco a $315,000 penalty for wage and hour violations. Shorting workers on their legally owed earnings is an active choice made somewhere in the management chain.
Workplace safety violations came in four separate cases — all cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Combined, those four citations cost Petco $62,089. Each one represents a workplace where someone’s physical safety was not adequately protected.
An air pollution violation in California rounded out the record. Petco’s operations drew a $39,000 penalty from the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 2025.
Six violations across two years — covering three separate categories of law — is not a pattern of isolated accidents. It is a picture of a company that treats regulatory penalties as an acceptable cost of running stores the way it chooses to run them. Measured against Petco’s nearly $6 billion in annual sales, those fines amount to less than one-hundredth of one percent of revenue. At that scale, the penalty is not a deterrent. It is a rounding error.
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
0.007% of annual income
$5.63
the same share of income that $416,089 in penalties takes of the company’s revenue
Petco's $416,089 in regulatory penalties is 0.007% of its revenue — for a median household, the same bite as a $5.63 ticket.
No government subsidies were paid to Petco during this period, so there is no public-money contrast to draw here.