1) reporting takes time at the staff level, significant time. Which they have to pay for, compounding the losses. I’ve seen security footage, and in some cases it was literally constant. They’d need full time staff just to call the police and report, assuming the cops would even show up if they did that.
2) they can write off the stolen inventory at 100% anyway, and most of them are self insured against this stuff. ‘Shrinkage’ is a normal business operating cost anyway, it’s the scale of it at some of these locations that is nuts.
3) a number of larger chains just gave up and pulled out of the worse areas, and made very public statements about it and why. [https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/wireStory/theft-plagued-walgre...]
Anecdotally, I was at a Best Buy in the east bay picking someone up. Not a bad area. And one of the fire alarms went off on an emergency exit and I saw someone dart out with something. The staff member just reset the alarm, sighed, and continued helping me. No attempt to do anything else. I asked what was going on and they said shoplifting, and that it happens all the time.
Last year I was picking up a small generator at a Home Depot in San Jose - not a bad area - and they had to go into a locked area to get it - they said that was because people would load up a cart with generators and tools and just walk out with them. Nothing they could do, and it was a daily occurrence so now they keep things locked up.
Pretty sad frankly.
It has been my understanding that for like at _least_ fifteen, twenty years major retailers have had a "Do not attempt to physically stop shoplifters." policy. The opinions I heard were split on whether it was to protect against an injury suit file by the thief if he were injured during the detention, or having to pay a _ton_ if an employee got seriously injured during the detention. (Source: talking to friends who worked on the floor for major retailers at the start of the century.)
TBH, it smells like both to me.
Anyway, all this is to say that retailers haven't been _physically_ restraining thieves walking out of their stores for quite some time... but that doesn't _necessarily_ mean that they've stopped reporting the thefts. (Indeed, the SF Mayor's Office's crowing about retrieving items from Retail Theft Rings suggests that -at minimum- a subset of the affected retailers _do_ report thefts.)
This is differ if you have rare theft of high price items.
If retail theft is as endemic as reporting would seem to indicate, I don't know how they could get insurance for 'petty' theft anyway, so a police report isn't likely to be useful. Likely their business insurance has higher deductibles anyway, so it's more useful for major theft or damage, not for smaller claims.