Stealing groceries doesn't pay the electricity bill.

of course it does. you steal 20 deoderant sticks, 3 jugs of laundry detergent, 6 packs of gillete razors, and a couple of 12 packs of RX Bars, and you can fence that for $60-80 in SF. You can easily do a couple of fencing runs a day. conservatively thats $2400 a month if you do 2x runs a day 5 days a week lol. Plenty of people in SF make a living like this. Every couple of months the feds catch a fencing operation selling millions of dollars of stolen items on ebay a year.

Deoderant in particular is incredibly profitable because it sells super well on ebay. Just search old spice deoderant on ebay and look at all of the obviously stolen merchandise.

It's funny though, because it kinda creates tons of jobs. the highly incompetent just steal and sell to fencers, the semi-incompetent buy stolen goods and fence them on ebay, and poor consumers get to buy slightly cheaper goods on ebay. the only people who lose are stores elling goods, and consumers who have to ask salespeople to open the locked up merchandise.

Everyone who isn't a criminal loses because store prices must increase to cover the theft loss.

More likely the retail stores just close because when the authorities no longer enforce the law it becomes impossible to operate a business.