Ross Stores, Inc.

Ross Stores, Inc. is an American off-price retail company that operates two store brands — Ross Dress for Less and dd's DISCOUNTS — offering brand-name apparel, accessories, footwear, and home fashions at 20% to 60% off department and specialty store regular prices, generating $22.75 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025 across 2,267 stores in the United States and its territories.

This is a story about one of the most durable business models in American retail confronting the accumulated questions of maturity, trade policy, and channel evolution. Ross has no e-commerce operation, sources more than half its merchandise from China, and derives nearly all its growth from opening physical stores and squeezing modest comparable-store-sales gains from an increasingly value-conscious customer base. For two decades those attributes were competitive advantages — capital-light, tariff-arbitraged, internet-proof — and they produced a compounding machine that turned a dollar of retained earnings into fourteen over twenty years.

The file turns on a single question: how many more years of mid-single-digit unit growth and buyback-driven EPS compounding the market is actually pricing in, and whether the assumptions beneath that multiple still hold in a world where tariffs are no longer theoretical and the off-price share of apparel retail no longer looks obviously under-penetrated.