A related story is that the Walgreens CFO admitted during a recent earnings call that the company may have overstated "shrinkage" of inventory and that it had spent too much on "largely ineffective" private security to combat it: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/walgreens-may-have-overstate...

It is hard to fully understand what caused the disconnect from reality.

Here's a good NPR piece discussing the issue: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/12/18/is-shoplifting-getti...