Data
Off-price sector scorecard
Three companies absorb most of the surplus apparel that leaves conventional retail in the United States. Their scale is the reason a glut can clear at all, and their buying discipline is the reason it clears at a price.
By The Retail Ledger · Figures from each company’s most recent reported fiscal year · September 27, 2026
| Company | Banners | Revenue | Gross margin | Operating margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TJX Companies | TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Winners, TK Maxx | $60.4B | 30.96% | 11.89% |
| Ross Stores | Ross Dress for Less, dd’s Discounts | $24.5B | 33.38% | 12.72% |
| Burlington Stores | Burlington | $12.2B | 44.08% | 7.79% |
Read the gross margin column with care
Burlington’s gross margin looks thirteen points better than TJX’s. That is not a statement about buying skill. Retailers allocate distribution, buying and occupancy costs differently between cost of sales and operating expense, so gross margin is not comparable across companies without normalizing. Operating margin, further down the income statement, is the more comparable line, and on that measure the order changes.
Why the sector’s capacity matters
When a glut arrives, the off-price channel is the release valve, and its capacity is finite in the short run. In the second half of 2022 the markdown wave from conventional retailers reached off-price buyers all at once, which shifted the balance of negotiating power sharply toward the buyers: when every seller needs to move goods in the same quarter, the price of moving them falls.
That dynamic is the background to any bulk disposal completed in that window, and it is why the sequence in the glut timeline matters more than any single transaction in it.
Source: company annual reports. Revenue and margin figures are as reported for each company’s most recent fiscal year and are not adjusted for differences in cost classification.