lol all these responses and I don’t think I saw a single one from someone who worked loss prevention.
I worked loss prevention. Here’s the actual answer.
Every store has loss prevention at some level. Even if there aren’t dedicated loss prevention staff in store, there is someone at the district level or higher up that may stop by stores and apprehend people. Usually they target boosters (people who steal large amounts professionally) or repeat offenders.
However, some stores have an across the board policy of non-apprehension. For those stores, if the person hits them enough they might try and get the police involved. Otherwise? Yah, they just let them steal. They build it into the price, do some merchant protection (like EAS tags), lock some stuff up, and then just assume the loss for everything else.
Over the last decade, a lot of stores were moving to that model of letting it walk out the door and handling the loss. But then shoplifters started catching on, and the stores lost a ton of money and are now starting to make apprehensions again.
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