No, it really was a hoax perpetuated by companies that want to sell security services to retail chains and other groups that want more police funding. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/01/the-shoplifting-...

Like how Cloudflare wants you to think every unprotected website gets DDoSed.

Have you ever read any investigative journalism about those crime stories? Or about local crime news via papers and television? Those two news sources are starved for news stories and law enforcement agencies have well funded PR arms (one should wonder why this is) and their associated affiliated unions/associations are quite eager to become the primary(only sometimes) sources for news (one should wonder why this is true for stories even from supposedly neutral reporting like AP and NPR). Theft has existed since there has been trading - we see plenty of examples of this with nesting/courting animals with rocks and sticks, but this "crime wave" whenever the USA status quo of law enforcement/prison industrial complex is threatened or new prisons/private prisons need to be justified is blatantly obvious.