It’s not at all unusual for local businesses to offer freebies to cops on the beat. The businesses like the visual for the benefit of potential burglars.
You just described a situation where one merchant gets a unionized government cop walking in, altering his beat, in exchange for 10 or 20 dollars worth of goods, while the honest merchant doesn’t.
On day one, someone less scrupulous might say that no real harm was done, the cop only sold out for one day, and the merchant might not have been thinking of it as a bribe, but this can, and has, become part of the cop system, and involves vast amounts of money around the nation, and it shapes what cops do, and where they do it at, and it creates a tit for tat (compensation) mentality.