The Yeti NOligarchy Profile
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Yeti earns a NOligarchy Score of 82.2 out of 100 — a mark that, when examined closely, tells two very different stories. The company scores perfectly on political influence and maintains a spotless legal record, but its wealth extraction picture reveals a brand that has opted to shower shareholders with cash while employing a remarkably small workforce.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
100.0
Wealth Extraction
37.4
Playing by the Rules
100.0
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: 100/100. Yeti spent nothing on federal lobbying, operated no Political Action Committee (PAC), and recorded no individual executive political donations from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). No lobbyists on retainer, no revolving-door hires, no PAC contributions. A perfect score.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 37.7/100. A score this low reflects the scale of stock buybacks relative to revenue and a CEO pay gap that dwarfs what the typical Yeti employee takes home. The company poured hundreds of millions into repurchasing its own shares while employing just over 1,200 people.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. No recorded regulatory fines, no violations on the public docket. Yeti’s compliance record is spotless.
Yeti ranks 9th out of 22 companies among companies sharing its federal industry classification (Sporting goods, hobby, and musical instrument retailers). The sector average score is 68.3, meaning Yeti’s 82.2 places it above most of its peers — but the wealth extraction pillar drags it well below the sector’s top performers and keeps it from climbing further.
The Bottom Line: A Boutique Workforce, a Billionaire’s Buyback Machine
Yeti reported nearly $1.87 billion in annual revenue from its most recent fiscal year, selling premium coolers and drinkware to a loyal customer base. Yet with just 1,255 employees on payroll, the company’s leadership elected to channel close to half a billion dollars into buying back its own stock across fiscal years 2024 and 2025 — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. That pool of cash was large enough to hand every single worker a raise exceeding $396,000 across those two years. Instead, those dollars flowed upward to the people who already own the most shares. Meanwhile, Yeti’s leadership stayed out of Washington entirely, leaving its perfect political score as the brightest corner of this profile.
No Footprint in Washington
Yeti is a rarity in corporate America: a publicly traded consumer brand that, across the full two-year period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, filed no federal lobbying disclosures under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), funded no PAC, and hired no revolving-door insiders from government. Yeti’s LDA filing record shows zero registered issue areas, zero lobbying firms, and zero lobbyists on retainer. No individual executive political donations were recorded either — leaving Yeti with a perfect political access score and not a single dollar of influence spending on the books.
EXHIBIT — THE RESERVED SEAT
$0 in lobbying · $0 in PAC money
Yeti filed no federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC in this window — the reserved seat at the witness table sits empty.
That total absence is worth noting plainly. A company selling nearly $1.87 billion worth of outdoor gear faces real policy exposure — tariffs on imported goods, consumer product safety rules, environmental regulations affecting the outdoor recreation industry, and retail trade standards. Most companies of this size deploy lobbyists to ensure their voice is heard when those rules get written. Yeti chose not to. No shared lobbying firms, no registered issue areas, no government entities lobbied. The record shows a company that has, to date, stayed entirely off Washington’s radar.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over a Tiny Workforce
Yeti’s wealth extraction score of 37.7 out of 100 is the defining number of this profile. With fewer than 1,300 workers on staff, the company’s buyback program is particularly striking — not because of its absolute size relative to the largest corporations in America, but because of how dramatically it towers over the people Yeti actually employs.
The CEO Pay Gap: Yeti’s CEO pay ratio is 134:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $12.5 million. The median Yeti employee earned $93,009 in the most recently reported fiscal year. That means the person running the company received, over that three-year average, compensation equivalent to what about 134 of the people making and selling its products bring home.
The Shareholder Payout: SEC filings show Yeti executed a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — spending $200 million in fiscal year 2024 and $297.78 million in fiscal year 2025, for a combined $497.78 million across those two years. That is equivalent to about 27% of the company’s most recently reported annual revenue channeled directly to shareholders through stock repurchases. Yeti paid no dividends at all, meaning it abandoned the traditional investor payout entirely and concentrated every dollar of shareholder return into buybacks — a more targeted mechanism for boosting the per-share price that disproportionately rewards insiders and large institutional holders who can time when they sell.
The Missed Raise: Yeti employs 1,255 workers. The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of those 1,255 workers a $396,637 raise, spread across the last two fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $198,319 annual raise the company chose not to give.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 1,255
Your share of the buyback
+$396,637
Per biweekly paycheck
+$7,628
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $497.8 million.
Spread across Yeti's 1,255 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $396,637 per worker — about $7,628 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 1K employees
Spent on buybacks
$497.8M
directed to shareholders
÷ 1K
workers
Per-worker raise
$396,637
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 213% annual raise on the median worker's $93,009 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
Executive Bonuses: Buybacks mechanically reduce the number of shares in circulation, which pushes up Earnings Per Share (EPS) even when the underlying business generates no additional profit. EPS is a standard trigger in executive compensation formulas. That means the same leadership team that approved spending nearly half a billion dollars on repurchases also stood to collect larger performance bonuses as a direct result — a self-reinforcing loop that the 134:1 pay ratio makes visible.
A Clean Record on the Public Docket
Yeti’s regulatory history is as bare as its lobbying record. Across the two-year period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, no fines, no violations, and no penalty payments appear in the public record. The Playing by the Rules score of 100/100 reflects a company that has, at minimum, avoided the enforcement actions that land on public databases. No public subsidies were recorded either, so there is no government-handout contrast to draw.
What the clean docket does not tell us is whether Yeti’s practices go untested or simply undetected. Public enforcement data captures only what regulators have formally pursued. That is the limit of what is visible here.