How do you steal a firearm in the first place? Unless you just bolted for the door while they were showing it to you.

If we spot a shoplifter in our store, we let them do their thing while the cops are on their way. As soon as they get outside, it is now considered theft and the cops are waiting for them. It has only happened a few times.

Regardless of all those policies every company has a policy against anyone no matter what position confronting a shoplifter with a weapon.

Regardless of all those policies every company has a policy against anyone no matter what position confronting a shoplifter with a weapon.

Yeah, and such policies enable criminals to ply their trade.

Such policies protect the company from liability and hopefully keep a bad situation from turning worse.Hope is such a lovely thing. It's a mathematical certainty that criminals will target the same business again once they learn its easy to rob them.
Shoplifting is not a robbery. In the event of a robbery every store I've consulted for had a strict policy of compliance with the robbers even for the LP personnel. Only armed guards and off duty officers were permitted to confront an armed subject.

You really want some cashier getting to a scuffle over a gun or knife. If it will prevent foreseeable murders from being done with that weapon, yes.
Better pay them well then. I can't imagine any large company expecting floor associates to risk their lives.


Not to mention the liability that occurs when they confront someone who isn't a shoplifter and proceed to get physical with them. This is already covered under law in "shopkeepers privilege"
Shopkeepers privilege allows stores to detain a suspected shoplifter for a reasonable amount of time to determine if a theft has occurred and allows for civil restitution to be collected. However "bad stops" are still a liability to the company. The average bad stop ends up costing the company about $5,000, at least those were the numbers in our directives 15 years ago.

There are professionals trained in detecting and apprehending shoplifters. Where are these soi-disant "professionals"? If they truly existed, thieves would be too terrified to steal.
They do, the trend of hands off or hands on cycles out about every ten years. I used to work hands on, then the companies shifted to hands off. Now more and more have seen their theft numbers increase and are moving back towards hands on. Hands on only applies to the trained LP personnel though. Shoplifters aren't scared, they just want their fix and will do anything to get it. Some are very organized and case the locations for months. At one company we had a group of guys whose job it was to identify and follow the organized boosters from store to store in order to identify their fence location and hand all that evidence over to the police. Irving used to have a store theft group made up of the property crimes detectives and any local retail store that was interested, I don't know if it still exists but it formed a line of communication between stores, police, and known shoplifters, really made a positive impact on shrink.

However no piece of store merchandise is worth your life. We finally agree on something. But the criminals life is worth far, far less to me than my property is.
Agreed. But a corporations property is worth less to me than my life.