> I wish they'd just hire an off-duty police officer some of the time. Same, but that's expensive and these stores often operate on very thin margins. I worke

> I wish they'd just hire an off-duty police officer some of the time. Same, but that's expensive and these stores often operate on very thin margins. I worked at a k-mart when I was a teenager, 20-something years ago. The store had a problem with shoplifting and did hire a security guy to come in. He got some arrests for "petty" shoplifting, but it took something like a year to nail the big one. It turned out that the employee who had installed the cameras had been doing a ton of shoplifting. They eventually caught him because he made a mistake and did something on-camera. That solved the shoplifting problem, but the security guy probably cost more than they saved. At any rate, the store closed down a year or two later.