The Ross NOligarchy Profile
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Ross earns a NOligarchy Score of 62.0 out of 100 for the period running from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period).
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
95.5
Wealth Extraction
0.3
Playing by the Rules
85.0
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: 95.47/100. Ross reports no federal lobbying spending and no Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions on record — no registered lobbyists, no lobbying firms, and no issue areas filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA).
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 0.12/100. This near-zero score reflects more than $2 billion in stock buybacks across two fiscal years alongside a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay package running nearly 2,800 times larger than what a typical worker takes home.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 85.0/100. This reflects three confirmed workplace-safety penalties totaling under $22,000 — a modest fine record, though every citation came from the same category of offense.
Sector Context: Ross ranks 16th out of 23 among companies sharing its federal industry classification, Clothing and clothing accessories retailers. The sector average score is 69.7, meaning Ross trails the industry baseline — its peers, on balance, present a cleaner accountability record.
The Bottom Line: A Billion-Dollar Buyback Habit, a Near-Invisible Political Footprint
Ross brought in $22.75 billion in annual revenue, according to its SEC EDGAR 10-K (CIK 0000745732), and chose to send roughly $1.05 billion back to shareholders through buybacks in each of the last two fiscal years — as much as 5.0% of total sales in fiscal 2024. At the same time, Ross spent essentially nothing trying to shape federal policy. The starkest imbalance isn’t in Washington — it’s between the cash Ross pours into propping up its own stock price and the regulatory penalties it racked up for workplace-safety lapses, which totaled just $21,971 over the two-year period: a sum so small it amounts to a rounding error against the company’s shareholder spending.
No Footprint in Washington
Ross reports $0 in federal lobbying spending and no PAC contributions under Federal Election Commission (FEC) data — no registered lobbyists, no lobbying firms, and no issue areas filed under the LDA. The only political money tied to Ross in this period comes from individual executives, who personally contributed a combined $4,509 across four separate disbursements between mid-2024 and mid-2026 — a modest sum that reflects personal giving by company leaders rather than corporate political spending.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over the Workforce
Ross’s CEO pay ratio is 2805:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, relative to its median employee, according to its SEC DEF 14A filing. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $28.2 million — while the median employee’s annual earnings sat at just $10,059. That figure places the company’s top executive in direct contrast with the worker squarely in the middle of its pay distribution.
Ross spent $1,050,021,000 in fiscal 2025 and $1,049,979,000 in fiscal 2024 on stock buybacks — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. This money flows disproportionately to the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own roughly 93% of the stock market, rather than to the people stocking shelves and running registers. Ross’s filings do not publicly disclose a total employee headcount alongside its buyback figures, so a precise per-worker raise calculation cannot be made — a gap that leaves the public unable to weigh the buyback total against what it could have meant for frontline pay.
Ross did not abandon traditional investor payouts in favor of buybacks alone. The company also paid $528,085,000 in dividends in fiscal 2025 and $488,721,000 in fiscal 2024, per its SEC 10-K. Both income streams flow to the same shareholder base, while the median employee’s annual salary sits at $10,059 — less than what the CEO’s three-year average package works out to per hour of a standard workweek.
Buybacks shrink the number of shares outstanding, which mechanically lifts Earnings Per Share (EPS) even when underlying profit hasn’t grown — and EPS targets are frequently baked into the performance metrics that determine executive bonuses. With Compensation Actually Paid running at 2,805 times the median worker’s compensation over the three-year average, the executives who approve these buyback programs are also among those whose bonuses benefit from the EPS bump those buybacks create.
Fines Treated as a Business Expense
Every confirmed violation in Ross’s public record over the two-year tracking period — covering penalties assessed in 2024 and 2025 — falls under a single offense group: workplace safety or health violations. All three cases were brought by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), totaling $21,971 across the period. Three citations in the same category is not a fluke — it is a recurring pattern of exposure on workplace-safety compliance. Ross ranks 5th out of 23 companies in the sector for total penalty amount.
The largest single penalty came in 2024, when OSHA fined Ross $8,175 for a workplace-safety violation. Two additional OSHA cases followed in 2025, with fines of $7,060 and $6,736 — each for the same category of offense.
While OSHA was citing Ross for workplace-safety violations in 2024, the company was simultaneously collecting public money. Ross received a total of $3,095,612 in public subsidies in 2024, anchored by a $3,000,000 grant from New York. That subsidy haul represents 140.9 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties Ross paid over the entire two-year period — a vivid illustration of how government accountability and government generosity can flow toward the same company at the same time.
$3.1 million
taxpayer subsidies
$21,971
regulatory fines
140.9:1
Ross collected $3.1 million in taxpayer subsidies against $21,971 in regulatory fines — 140.9 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties.