at stores that have a “do not interfere with shoplifters” policy, are people able to just walk in, take whatever they want, and leave without paying; or are there repercussions at some point?
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Loss Prevention builds a case against them and tries to get it to Felony level and THEN charge them with stealing. Felony charges are a lot more serious, and it is consistent and persistent repeat offenders that they concentrate on catching. They could care less about the nickel and dime kind of stuff. A LOT (more than 60 percent in some cases) of theft comes from Employees in retail stores so they spend their time watching staff and repeat offenders.
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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