Of course they actually do. Just be glad you're lucky enough not to have had to deal with that.
C'mon man, citation needed.
I'm going to pre-buttal a bunch of "that's not actually the same claim" items here:
* If it's a couple notable incidents before the company gets a bloody nose in an expensive lawsuit and changes things, then that's not regular behavior.
* If the employee detains someone in accordance with local laws (e.g. the seldom-usable "citizen's arrest"), then it's not illegally acting like police.
* If the person is detained by actual police because the employee called them over, then that's not the private company doing the detention.
For example, down in Washington State, I'd paraphrase the law [0] as "store owners can't be sued back if they had good evidence and only stopped the person enough to record information." (Note, that's separate from "citizen's arrest", which comes more from common-law precedents than from explicit statue.)
It's not just not a strawman, it's already happening, even if it is illegal
Your link doesn't say that though. Where does it supports the claim that suspect-customers were/will-be illegally detained?
Do you have some other source? And I don't mean "it happened once or twice before the company got slammed with a massive lawsuit that made them substantially change the policy."
Not sure what your understanding is, but imo if a person is physically blocked from leaving a store, then they are being detained. It doesn't matter if an employee is doing it or if it's a gate with a receipt scanner
They can and have had employees standing at exits to check receipts in the past, but people are under no obligation to present a receipt in order to be allowed to leave so most people just walk right by
Physically placing a barrier in the way to prevent that is detainment. Replacing the employee with a scanning machine doesn't somehow change that.
That seems like a straw-man argument. I've never seen anyone actually detained by private employees who suspect theft, and I'll bet many companies' policies quite explicitly prohibit those employees from trying.