Odd indeed.
I've been trying to find the story from another source, I won't give the NYT a hit. From the excerpt I know they got that part wrong. It may be worse than the NYT reported. You may be sure that the NYT is doing it's best to damage W-M any way it can.
In the first place it is not a new policy and it's not restricted to W-M, most major stores around here do not prosecute minor shop lifting as a first offense, regardless of how many signs they have posted that they "prosecute all shop lifters".
I worked for W-M for about 6 months after I retired from my regular job in 1999 and I worked in store security - catching shop lifters. We had to observe first hand someone shop lifting and never take our eyes off off them until they left the store, then we could detain them and take them to the office and if it was under $25 we would take their picture (A purely intimidating tactic) tell them they were banned from all W-Ms everywhere and let them go. If it was a second offense then we called the police.
If an employee, customer, even a member of management, told us that they saw a certain person stealing something, we could do nothing, we had to observe it first hand, it was all about liability and false arrest, they just couldn't take the chance that the thief put the item back while no one was watching.
I once caught three 13 year old girls shop lifting early home pregnancy kits. I took them to the back office and called their parents to come get them, the whole time they were begging me not to. I believe that was a good punishment for them.
I am a pretty big guy but my fellow security man was even bigger than I am and once we caught a woman after chasing her down and she put up a struggle. The only ones who got hurt were us. We each had one of her wrists and were restraining her and the whole time she was kicking our shins. We weren't allowed to retaliate with any kind of violent act to stop her, like the police can and do when they are attacked, we just had to take it until one of us let go of her arms and grabbed her feet.
W-Ms policy even then was to not prosecute anyone under 14 or over 65.
Every retailer around here(In Illinois) that I knew about had the same policies as Wal-Mart. I can't prove that and I can't cite anything, these policies are kept as secret as possible by all retailers for obvious reasons but you won't see that in the NYT.