The PetSmart NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score
52.6
/ 100
petsmart.com
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Ranked in
Pet Supplies & Services
#5
Subsidiary of BC Partners Advisors L.P.
PetSmart scores 52.52 out of 100 on the NOligarchy scale — last place among the five companies tracked in its sector, pulled down almost entirely by a documented $39 billion wealth extraction event tied to its private equity ownership chain.
Current Pillar Scores
BC Partners Advisors L.P. (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
94.2
Wealth Extraction
2.6
Playing by the Rules
36.3
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: 94.23/100. For a company generating nearly $8 billion in annual revenue, PetSmart’s Washington footprint is essentially invisible — no federal lobbying spend, no Political Action Committee (PAC), and no revolving-door hires on the payroll. That near-perfect score reflects a genuine absence of the influence machinery most retailers its size deploy to shape federal policy.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 2.61/100. This near-zero score is driven by a documented $39 billion collateral transfer of Chewy shares executed by PetSmart’s parent, BC Partners, in February 2021 — one of the largest single extraction events in the tracking database. An estimated CEO-to-worker pay gap of 536:1 adds further weight.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 36.04/100. Three enforcement actions between 2024 and 2025, spanning wage theft, worker safety, and consumer protection, produced $259,468 in total penalties and place PetSmart second worst among five sector peers on regulatory compliance.
PetSmart ranks 5th out of 5 companies in its federal industry classification, Other miscellaneous retailers, with a NOligarchy score of 52.52 against a sector average of 72.3. That nearly 20-point gap puts PetSmart well below every peer on accountability. Because PetSmart scores below 50 on wealth extraction and below sector average overall, readers looking for higher-scoring alternatives should check the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: A $39 Billion Transfer and Three Regulatory Violations
PetSmart pulled in $7.73 billion in annual revenue — but the defining number in this profile belongs to its private equity owner. BC Partners transferred approximately $39 billion worth of Chewy shares in February 2021, a documented event that the scoring system attributes to PetSmart’s ownership chain. From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the two-year tracking period — PetSmart’s own public record shows three regulatory violations across wages, worker safety, and consumer protection, totaling $259,468 in fines. As a private company, PetSmart faces no requirement to disclose how much its chief executive earns relative to frontline workers, leaving that accountability gap permanently open. The $259,468 in penalties amounts to roughly 0.003% of annual revenue — less than noise on a $7.73 billion income statement, but real money pulled from workers’ paychecks and consumers’ pockets.
No Footprint in Washington
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, PetSmart filed zero federal lobbying disclosures, spent nothing through a corporate PAC, and hired no former government officials to navigate the halls of Congress. PetSmart’s US retail sales represent 16.23% of the Other miscellaneous retailers market — yet the company chose not to convert any of that market position into direct federal influence spending.
The only political money traceable to PetSmart in this period is $21,004 in personal donations made by company executives, recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC): $3,954 in Q3 2024, $50 in Q4 2024, $5,000 in Q1 2025, $7,000 in Q4 2025, and $5,000 in Q1 2026. These are individual contributions — employees are entitled to donate on their own behalf. PetSmart itself channeled nothing.
Whether this reflects principled restraint or simply the calculations of a privately held company that prefers operating below the radar is not something the public record can answer. What it does confirm is that PetSmart, unlike most retailers of comparable scale, chose not to pay for a seat at any federal table during this period.
A $39 Billion Transfer the Shelf-Stackers Never Saw
PetSmart is a private company — no Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, no proxy statements, no mandatory pay-ratio disclosure. The best available benchmark for the CEO-to-worker earnings gap comes from AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch: 536:1, based on AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch industry benchmarks for comparable companies in this sector. For every dollar earned by a PetSmart associate stocking shelves, grooming dogs, or running a register, the chief executive is estimated to take home $536. This is a benchmark figure, not a verified number — PetSmart’s private structure means no verified number will ever be publicly available.
The wealth extraction story at PetSmart, however, does not stop at an estimated pay gap. In February 2021, BC Partners — the private equity firm that owns PetSmart — transferred 328,772,454 Chewy shares at a closing price of $118.69 per share, a transaction valued at approximately $39 billion and documented in Chewy’s fiscal year 2020 10-K filing. Chewy was spun out of PetSmart, meaning those shares represented wealth that PetSmart’s assets helped build. The $39 billion figure is conservative, based on the lower of two documented share counts. That is not a rounding error — it is roughly five times PetSmart’s entire annual revenue, moved in a single transaction through the private equity structure sitting above PetSmart’s workforce.
No stock buyback or dividend data is recorded for PetSmart as a standalone entity. As a private company with no publicly traded shares, the mechanism of a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses does not apply in the way it does at publicly listed retailers. The wealth here flowed through a different channel — one that required digging through Chewy’s public SEC filings to document at all.
Three Violations, Three Categories, One Consistent Pattern
PetSmart’s most consequential compliance numbers are in its enforcement record, where three cases filed between 2024 and 2025 totaled $259,468 in penalties and spanned three distinct categories of wrongdoing. Over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, this is not a company that slipped up in one department — it drew regulatory attention on wages, worker safety, and consumer protection inside the same span.
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
0.0034% of annual income
$2.71
the same share of income that $259,468 in penalties takes of the company’s revenue
PetSmart's $259,468 in regulatory penalties is 0.0034% of its revenue — for a median household, the same bite as a $2.71 ticket.
The largest single category was wage theft. A wage and hour case resolved in 2025 by the Colorado Attorney General’s office carried a $225,000 penalty — the overwhelming majority of PetSmart’s entire fine total for the period. For workers who depend on every hour of pay to cover rent, groceries, and childcare, a wage violation is not an administrative error — it is money pulled directly from their take-home pay.
The remaining cases covered two additional areas: a $14,468 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) citation for workplace safety conditions in 2025, and a $20,000 consumer protection settlement reached with the Pennsylvania Attorney General in 2024. PetSmart’s penalty rank of second worst out of five companies in its sector places it near the bottom of a small competitive field — a meaningful position in a group where the leaders maintain clean compliance records.