AFAIK, this is simply not true. If you talk to any retailer, shrink is the number one problem they mention by far, I was at NRF this January and saw this personally in my interviews with several grocery, pharmacy, and apparel retailers.

Also, when you say "manufactured moral panic", who do you think is manufacturing this? Perhaps the retailers, in order to justify the closing of their lagging stores in bad neighborhoods? If you follow the store closings you see this is not always the case, e.g. the Cotopaxi example I sited in my comment above (https://sgbonline.com/cotopaxi-closes-store-in-san-fransisco...). I can provide many other examples.