Subject: Re: I Grok Schlock
That's not how retail theft accounting works. They don't look at theft in the detergent section and say, "Let's not offer detergent because it's bringing the entire store down,". They amortize the theft across the rest of the items.

Once the losses add up to a point where the store is no longer able to be 'hidden' among the other stores, it gets shut down. Once it goes it takes the rest of the products with it.

Sure, but again that doesn't explain the differential impact of theft of these items. If it's things like Tide that are being stolen, that affects all the stores that sell things like Tide - not just grocery stores. In fact, we would expect the grocery stores to do better than other stores, because a larger proportion of their goods are things that are less susceptible to shoplifting: the stores that sell entirely prepackaged shelf-stable products would suffer more, because their entire product line would be more subject to shoplifting.

To make this simple - is there anything that you're aware of that has documented that shoplifting causes (or even contributes to) food deserts? Not store closures as a general matter, but food deserts specifically?