These situations are really difficult to call. Of course you would think that stopping thieves and especially knife-weilders is important and just.
OTOH, the crooks can turn around and accuse store employees of all the usual junk…racism, etc etc and drag things out in court for years. And God forbid the store employee would injure the perp. You can imagine where that would go.
In my state, selling hard liquor in supermarkets was just voted in. The very first day, a kid robbed the neighborhood supermarket of a couple of expensive bottles of hootch. They just watched him run out the door with it and caught him on camera. I think he was apprehended by police. The store changed the location of the booze, so it’s further from the door.
While I respect your opinion mine is the opposite view. Having owned two retail stores for ten years, I finally sold them both due to shoplifting both from customers and employees.
Approximately 5% of the retail price of everything was set aside to cover these thieves.
So, Kroger execs are effectively flipping the bird at their paying customers and one day they will lose these customers and go broke because their competition will bust these bastards as we did and pay their lawyers to aggressively fight off lawsuits and sue law firms filing such suits as Chevron is now doing on enviro issues.