Rhode Island
Mystery buyer of $79.5M Wyoming ranch 4 times the size of NYC — and larger than Rhode Island —is revealed
The mysterious buyer of a Wyoming ranch four times larger than New York City and bigger than the state of Rhode Island has been identified as a chief executive officer and local politician who already owns a million acres of land.
Christopher Robinson, the CEO of Ensign Group L.C., scooped up the massive 916,000-acre Pathfinder Ranches on behalf of the landholding company and closed the deal on Jan. 14, according to KPCW.
Robinson purchased the land for an undisclosed amount, only four years after he bought the neighboring Stone Ranch.
The massive property, which rolls across 1,431-square-miles, was listed over the summer by Swan Land Company broker Scott Williams for a whopping $79.5 million. New York City spans across 300.4 square miles, while Rhode Island spans 1,033.9.
Spreading across four counties in the Rocky Mountains, the Pathfinder Ranches is made up of four separate properties and encompasses over 1% of the land in the Cowboy State.
Actual deedage acreage of the historic purchase added up to 99,188 acres with the additional land coming from leases, according to the Cowboy State Daily.
The Park City, Utah resident is using the smaller ranch to bridge together the Pathfinder Ranches properties and create a self-sustainable livestock range.
“So, we’re kind of reuniting that, and we intend to, we’re operators,” Robinson told the outlet. “We’re not generally landlords. We’re going to, over time, grow into it, where we’re mostly running our own livestock on it.”
Robinson plans to work the property’s livestock to become self-sufficient rather than buying from outside the ranch.
The land was estimated to have a capacity of 90,444 Animal Unit Months, the amount of livestock a rangeland can support.
“With cattle prices as high as they are, we’re not going to be buying any mother cows to stock,” he said. “We keep a lot of heifers back anyway, so we’re going to grow internally.”
“If things get really tough, we’ll get rid of yearlings,” he said. “But we don’t get rid of mother cows. There have been droughts and things in the past, but we’ve got enough scale and flexibility that we can sell the yearlings.”
The Ensign Group, co-owned by Robinson and his siblings Alexander and Victoria Robinson, has acquired over 1 million acres of private and public lands throughout Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming under the Ensign Ranches moniker.
Before the massive purchase, the Robinson and Freed portfolio ranked at number 31 on Land Report Magazine’s Top 100 Landowner List.
Pathfinder Ranches may push the group’s portfolio to over 470,000 acres up 10 spots on the list and surpassing billionaire Jeff Bezos’ own impressive 462,000 acres, according to KPCW.
“We love land and water. We think it’s a good long-term investment, and we like the opportunities it affords us to be stewards over a piece of God’s creation,” Robinson said.
Robinson, a graduate from the University of Utah, is one of the five members of the Summit County Council, a seat he has held since his election in 2008, according to the county’s website.
He has extensive experience in production agriculture, local government, mineral and resource development, public lands, renewable energy and conservation efforts.
In December, Robinson announced that he would not run for reelection.
Robinson is also on the board of several conservation and land groups in the Utah area.
The newly purchased land is also home to a diverse ecosystem of wildlife including housing the US’s first sage-grouse conservation bank.”
“It’s a statewide bank that, if there’s any damage to, disturbance to, core habitat for greater sage-grouse, one option for mitigation would be to buy credits from the Pathfinder,” Robinson told the outlet. “[The property has] got a lot of sage grouse on it, a lot of antelope, pronghorn, deer and elk. It’s teeming with life.”
The property, named after rolling foothills, high plains and broad river valleys, is a cowboy’s dream and one of Swan Land’s largest sales in Wyoming.
“This is what we specialize in are the large complicated transactions,” Williams told the Cowboy State Daily. “And the beauty of this is the buyers are excellent ranchers, but they’re also conservation-minded operators as well.
“That’s a plan that will take some time to realize,” Robinson said.
Rhode Island drivers are the most attentive in America, a recent study revealed.
The study, conducted by personal injury law firm Easton & Easton, examined National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality Analysis Reporting System data and Federal Highway Administration licensed driver statistics from 2019 to 2023 and determined Rhode Islanders died in distracted driving crashes less than the residents of any other state, according to a media release accompanying the results.
See also: As Iran Conflict Continues, Here’s What Gas Could Cost In Rhode Island
“That gamble has cost thousands of American families a loved one in the past five years,” according to the release. “Now, with Google rolling out its voice-interactive ‘Ask Maps’ feature, the question is which parts of the country can least afford one more distraction.”
See also: Rhode Island’s Truck Traffic Densest In Nation: Study
A mere 2.6 Rhode Islanders were killed in distracted driving crashes per year from 2019 to 2023, compared to 639.8 Texans.
But the rate per 100,000 drivers was also impressively the lowest in the nation at 0.34. The state with the highest number per 100,000 drivers was New Mexico with 16.95
Watch: advocate argues for minimum wage in Rhode Island’s going to $20
Affordable Rhode Island’s Michael Beauregard argues that the minimum wage should be $20 an hour, to get closer to what it actually costs to live.
PROVIDENCE – As lawmakers debate raising Rhode Island’s minimum wage, which would impact many grocery store workers, a bill to limit the number of self-checkout lanes at grocery stores is again stirring conversation.
Rep. Megan Cotter, D-Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond, introduced a version of her initial bill, proposed in 2023, to reduce the number of self-checkout kiosks a grocery store can have open, and mandate the amount of labor required to operate them. Her bill, H 7290, has eight co-sponsors in the House, while Senate President Valarie Lawson, D-East Providence, introduced a companion bill in the Senate, S 2342.
When Cotter’s bill was first introduced, it included a mandate that grocers give a 10% discount to customers who used self-checkout for more than 10 items. The newest iteration scraps that language in favor of a more streamlined approach:
- Grocery stores can have no more than eight self-checkout kiosks operating at one time.
- One checkout line must be manned for every two self-checkout kiosks.
- One worker must be assigned to every two self-checkout stations.
Here’s how the math on the self-checkout proposal works:
For a store operating the maximum number of self-checkout kiosks, eight, this means the store would be running four lines with cashiers at a time. That same store would also need four people monitoring the self-checkout stations, for a total of eight workers across 12 cash registers, both manned and unmanned.
Limiting the number of self-checkout aisles a store can have is all about preserving jobs and hours worked, she previously said.
Why stores are using self-checkout
In 2023, Cotter said her original bill was partially a function of her frustration with using the Walmart self-checkout kiosks.
Problems with self-checkout kiosks abound as each industry, from groceries to pharmacies to hardware to big box stores like Walmart, sets different parameters and triggers on self-checkout machines.
Clements’ Marketplace Operations Director Charles Anthony IV wrote in testimony against Cotter’s bill that the grocery, with locations in Bristol and Portsmouth, installed the self-checkout kiosks to be their “fast lanes.”
“With smaller orders often causing backups across the Front End, the Fast Lanes have helped to maintain a steady pace and take care of our customers more efficiently,” Anthony wrote.
At Target, self-checkout was meant to be limited to people with 10 items or fewer.
Why limit self-checkout?
Cotter’s bill only targets grocery stores. That caught the attention of Rhode Island Food Dealers Association President Scott Bromberg, who submitted testimony against the proposal.
“This proposal is especially egregious because it specifically targets only grocery stores,” Bromberg wrote. “Big box retailers, along with hardware stores, pharmacies, dollar stores, fast food chains and more utilize self-checkout to allow them to deploy their staff where needed most.”
The bill mostly targets traditional grocery stores, but also hits pharmacies, like CVS and Walgreens, but might not include big box retailers like Walmart and Target.
It defines groceries as:
- Raw or processed food or drink
- Prescription and over-the-counter drugs
- Hygiene items when a store also sells food, drink and “miscellaneous household items” like laundry detergent and dishwasher soap.
A grocery store is defined as a business that gets most of its revenue from selling “groceries.”
Shaw’s and Star Market’s Jim O’Leary wrote that 60% to 65% of its transactions are done via self-checkout systems and 10% are done through its drive-up platform.
“Only approximately 25% of customers utilize traditional staffed registers. This distribution highlights the importance of maintaining adaptive service models to accommodate a broad spectrum of consumer preferences, thereby enhancing the overall shopping experience and most importantly convenience,” O’Leary wrote.
Which RI stores use self-checkout?
Stores in the state offer a wide variety of takes on self-checkout.
At many Five Below stores, self-checkout is the only option. Home Depot has replaced most checkout lanes at the front of many its stores with self-checkout lanes.
At the discount grocer Aldi, many stores have open self-checkout kiosks. Depending on how slow business is, it can sometimes take a few minutes for a cashier to return to a regular checkout lane, as employees do double duty as cashiers and stockers. Customers are also expected to do their own bagging.
Stop & Shops usually have a variety of self-checkout kiosks and cashiers, but the kiosks practically shout at customers and the scales, meant to prevent theft, often wrongly register item weights, forcing a worker to override the machine after an item is bagged too quickly, or not quickly enough.
Many CVS stores also have the self-checkout kiosks.
Self-checkouts have also moved into the world of fast food, for example at Taco Bell and McDonald’s, shifting workers away from being cashiers.
Is low-skill labor worth keeping?
The two-self checkout restriction bills are aimed at preserving jobs often classified as entry level or low skill.
The worth and value of those jobs is increasingly under fire by legislators and the business community, especially as the debate over minimum wage increases rages.
Rep. Stephen Casey, D-Woonsocket, made the case during a hearing on March 18 that it would be unfair for the minimum wage to be increased because public sector workers don’t make enough, making an argument that low-skilled labor deserves to be paid less.
“So the average fireman in Rhode Island makes $28.06 an hour, so you’re saying that the guy that’s flipping burgers should make $20 an hour?” Casey asked during the hearing.
That argument also appeared during the debate over a bill to give health care workers time-and-a-half on Sundays, as Woonsocket resident Jason Romblad said he was “amazed that people selling us a pack of gum will get time-and-a-half on these days, but a health care worker who takes care of us when we are sick and hurt do not get it.”
A separate bill to strip caterers and commissary workers of time-and-a-half on Sundays and holidays was lauded by businesses groups that called for ending the practice entirely. National Federation of Independent Businesses State Director Christopher Carlozzi wrote in support of ending the benefit, claiming that paying minimum wage workers $24 an hour on Sundays instead of the mandated $16 (a $64 pre-tax difference for an eight-hour shift) means the difference between opening a shop on Sundays or leaving it closed.
According to the state’s latest Occupational Employment And Wage Statistics, published in May 2025, cashiers, an estimated 9,710 of them in the state, make a mean average of $15.90 an hour. That climbs to $16.67 an hour for “experienced wage.” The entry wage was $14 an hour, the minimum wage in 2024.
In January, the minimum wage increased to $16 an hour and it increases to $17 an hour on Jan. 1, 2027.
Other large groups of similarly paid professions are fast food and counter workers, 12,650 of them; dining room and cafeteria attendants, 2,720 of them; and dishwashers, 2,830 of them.
The statistics count an estimated 493,800 employed, making cashiers 2% of the total employment in the state.
CHARLESTOWN, RI — The food website Mashed named Rhode Island’s best buffet restaurant.
Mashed went with The Nordic in Charlestown, despite its prices.
“The Nordic is one of the most expensive buffets in the country, so don’t expect a cheap meal when you sit down at the popular waterside eatery,” the Mashed story said. “The price for adults is $145 per person, $60 for children aged 8 to 12, and $35 for children aged 3 to 7. That sounds pretty steep, but considering that you can fill up on prime rib, a high-quality and costly cut of steak, it seems worth it for a special occasion.
“One of the main draws of dining at The Nordic is that you can chow down on prime rib,” according to Mashed, but there is much, much more, including lobster, snow crab legs, fried scallops, scallops wrapped in bacon and black angus filet mignon.
See the full Mashed story here.
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