The articles you linked don’t support your conclusions. Sure, retail corporations will obviously attempt to frame the narrative such that it is advantageous to them. But you’re acting as if the fact that corporations have (possibly) overstated their losses indicates that shoplifting is not an issue?

The stats I’m seeing

Shrink totaled $112.1 billion in losses in 2022, about 1.6 percent of companies’ sales, up from $93.9 billion the year before

External theft accounts for about 35% of that figure, consistently

So shoplifting is costing greater than 0.5% of total sales annually. That’s far from negligible, considering the razor thin margins that most retailers operate with.

Shoplifting reports in 24 major cities where police have consistently published years of data — including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas and San Francisco — were 16% higher during the first half of 2023 compared to 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis.

However, excluding New York City, the number of incidents among the remaining cities was 7% lower.

The rise in shoplifting in NYC has been so massive that it has overshadowed the mild decline in shoplifting in other cities.

Walgreens said organized shoplifting was the reason it closed five stores in San Francisco in 2021.

Perhaps one reason why shoplifting rates in some cities has declined is that many stores in bad areas have been closed in the past several years in order to reduce shoplifting. Imagine that: companies complain about increased shoplifting > companies close problematic locations > shoplifting decreases. Granted I have no evidence to prove this hypothesis, but it certainly seems plausible.

My intuition is that this strategy (closing stores) is less effective in NYC because of the subway system. Unlike most other US cities, mass transit and density enables criminals to access any and all neighborhoods in the city, so closing individual locations simply causes the thieves to target another location.

“The overall data doesn’t indicate a great shift in the average shoplifting event, but the brazen ransacking incidents, coordinated on social media and captured on video, clearly suggest that there is a sense of lawlessness afoot,” said Adam Gelb, the CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arrests-nyc.html

Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times

I wonder how many times they shoplifted and got away with it, if they got caught 6,000 times in one year. There is a concept known as the dark figure of crime, which refers to the hidden figure of unreported crimes that is not captured by the official statistics. Whether the criminal got away with it cleanly, the victim didn’t want to go through the legal hassle, the cops didn’t feel like filling out a report, etc, crime statistics are inherently unreliable (with the exception of homicide)

By the end of 2022, the theft of items valued at less than $1,000 had increased 53 percent since 2019 at major commercial locations, according to a new analysis of police data by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Over the past five years, shoplifting complaints nearly doubled, peaking at nearly 64,000 last year, police data shows. Only about 34 percent resulted in arrests last year, compared with 60 percent in 2017.

A spokeswoman for Walgreens, Kris Lathan, said the company had created a “major crimes unit” to assist authorities with investigations.

IIRC, corporations aren’t known to waste money, so the expansion of internal security departments and shoplifting prevention strategies seems like pretty good evidence that the problem is real.

In conclusion, corporations suck and I hate them, but there is a fairly significant shoplifting problem in America right now.