Who Owns Ross Dress for Less?

The Ross name carried a business before it carried a discount chain. From 1957 to 1982, a small family-operated junior department store chain called Ross operated in the San Francisco Bay Area, selling conventional apparel at conventional margins.

The modern brand dates to August 1982, when Stuart Moldaw and a group of investors acquired the chain's six stores and rebuilt them in the off-price format pioneered on the opposite coast by chains such as Marshalls and T.J. Maxx. The converted stores sold brand-name merchandise bought as closeouts, overruns, and end-of-season goods at 20 to 60 percent below department store prices, and the model found immediate traction in California.

The parent company went public on Nasdaq in August 1985 at $17.00 per share. By fiscal 1986, Ross Dress for Less had expanded to 121 stores in 16 states with $534 million in sales, growth fast enough to strain operations. Management throttled expansion through the late 1980s to rebuild buying depth and distribution infrastructure, a discipline that defined the banner's next three decades: measured store growth funded entirely from operating cash flow.

The 1990s and 2000s pushed the chain coast to coast. By fiscal 2000 it operated 409 stores in 17 states plus Guam. The 2000s added the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic alongside new distribution centers and merchandising systems, reaching 988 stores by fiscal 2010 with sales of $7.9 billion.

The 2010s cemented the banner's market position. Ross passed 1,000 stores, moved its headquarters from Pleasanton to Dublin, and became the largest off-price apparel chain in the country by store count. The pandemic shut every store in spring 2020, but off-price demand rebounded faster than department store demand, and the chain emerged with a strengthened value proposition as inflation squeezed household budgets.

Recent years brought the banner's biggest geographic pushes in a decade: first stores in the New York metro area and in Puerto Rico opened in 2025, bringing the chain to 1,904 locations across 44 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico at the end of fiscal 2025. Fiscal 2025 sales reached a record $22.8 billion for the company, with comparable store growth of 5 percent. Management's long-range plan calls for roughly 2,900 Ross stores, which implies more than 900 locations of remaining growth.