I would have thought most progressives absolutely believe crime is rising - due to the increased wealth gap in the U.S.

This. Everyone agrees that retail theft is a problem, the dispute is whether to address it by looking at root causes or just to yell at people to get a third job and stop criming.

Do you think most shoplifting is done by people who are otherwise employed?

I took a look at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/27419/00000274192100... and searched for theft, and found this text as the only hit: "data loss or theft [...] could [...] adversely affect our results of operations. We continually invest to maintain and update our computer systems."

What are you finding in the SEC reports about theft? I'm not an expert at reading them.

Search for shrink

When I tried that, it didn't show a lot of detail. It seems they blend shrinkage generally into the cost of goods sold, and the original article in the thread discusses the idea that shrinkage is mostly caused by employees, not non-employee theft. I consider employee theft to be not the kind retail theft that news articles are really about. I can't find what you're saying, losses due to theft generally, nor can I find something specific about non-employee theft. Let me know if you can find something else I can search for, since I am quite new to this.

this report? https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?webmasterId=1...

i'm not seeing losses due to theft broken out anywhere.

This isn't a progressive thing. There's a strange wish in conservative circles that progressives love crime