United States | News & Politics

No shit. External shrink numbers are always a very tiny percentage of operating costs. Look at rent and labor if you want to know what they're actually trying to balance.

It's idiotic that businesses fight labor so much btw. They always view labor as a controllable cost and rent as one that's not controllable, which is bullshit. Margins always have to be made, no matter what business rents the space. If labor costs across an industry increase to the point that rents don't justify running a business there, the landlords will drop their prices (after going bankrupt and losing the property to the bank and the bank losing money from that). If you keep squeezing the workers, the landlords will raise their prices. It's always capital squeezing everything out of everyone, no matter how you look at it.