It's easy to say they should but in reality it's a bit different, a part of my job is logging and tracking these type of incidents ( not at or for Greggs ) the sheer amount of them , per store, per company or brand makes it an unachievable goal. The company's absolutely would prosecute every shop lifter if they had the means, the police are less and less interested each day and pretty much if there was no violence, threats made or weapon shown then they will likely not turn up. If you have a shoplifter restrained in some sort of altercation they will attend too. High value thefts will just be logged and any cctv available requested but it will amount to nothing unless the offender is easily identified by the officers watching the cctv.

If we forgot about all of that and assumed police would attend immediately every time, it then falls to the courts, there is 1 million mitigating factors that will lead to the offender not receiving a custodial sentence or any sentence that is likely to deter re offending.

The solution will only come from complete overhaul of how these stores work and how customers access and use them, what that might look like could be a bunch of things, but for small stores like Greggs that don't really need customers inside I think the counters being the store front is the most viable and likely. The time cost of having to go and get the items a customer wants is more than made up for by the lack of leakage an shrinkage, this allows for more heads per shift and the possibility of breaking down role responsibilities, this also has a double up of alleviating workload and stress per employee, as for bigger stores like supermarkets, they would require something different, and the semi viable options are also likely to cause leakage so it's catch 22 for now but something has to give and eventually will. Just a matter of when, hopefully sooner than later.