In a similar case, Target blamed shoplifting for its decision to close a store in East Harlem, and the New York Post parroted the claim—but its landlords said that the closure was actually the result of a “business decision to move to small-format stores,” and that theft hadn’t been raised as an issue at all. Last January, Walgreens’s finance chief admitted on an earnings call that “maybe we cried too much” about shoplifting in the previous year, as the company’s rate of “shrink” had actually fallen from 3.5 percent of total sales to around 2.5 percent.
Yep:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2024/01/the-shoplifting-epidemic-is-a-lie