Many years ago the State I lived in allowed the retailer to levy some heavy fines against shoplifters, or their parents if the lifters were minors.
(this was a long time ago and I do not remember exactly, but the remuneration was pretty stiff)
I knew someone who tried to collect on behalf of the dept stores.
Then there were the parents who would keep the girl scout cookie money, or write bad checks for the boxes, Not like the troop could retaliate against the poor little girls
Although Target Is not really Innocent themselves
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkkepv/target-knows-you-re-pregnant
First, all Target customers are assigned a Guest ID.
Associated with this ID is information on “your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in,
how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently,
what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit.”
Pole found that by analyzing this data combined with purchasing history on 25 products – things like unscented lotion and certain types of vitamins — he could determine the likelihood that a woman was pregnant.
He quantified this information by assigning women a “pregnancy prediction” score; his data analysis was so good that he could estimate, within a fairly small window of time, a woman’s due date.
This further allowed Target to send the women coupons targeted at different stages of pregnancy.
I began my working life in retail in a saner era when retailers could legally protect themselves by detaining observed shoplifters by any means. Now, the retailer would be arrested without bail, hauled into court and convicted.