Home Depot doesn’t stop thieves. I could walk in, grab some high dollar tool kits in each hand and calmly walk out right past the cashier without even being spoken to.
Might be regional, but at my HD, when I buy something like a cordless drill, I have to ask an employee to get it from behind a locked case, and then they walk me to the cash register - I'm essentially done shopping. Last time they said they would hold it for me if I had more shopping to do, but I didn't and I would have had to waste time tracking them back down anyway. They also don't let you use the self-checkout - an employee has to check you out.
Also on the theft, yeah, it seems a lot of employees couldn't care less. I was at the Tractor Supply last week, and bought like $100 worth of stuff. After I got rung up, I hesitated about the price I saw on the CC reader. It took a few seconds for it to hit, as in I was taking my first steps away from the register when my brain said, "Hey wait a minute..." The receipt was for $60-something.
So I turned around and told the young girl cashier, "I like getting discounts, but I think this one is too much." Turned out she forgot to scan a $40 jug of algaecide. What got me is that she never said "thanks for catching that"* and was in fact almost perturbed at the extra work of checking the receipt and ringing the forgotten item up.
*I don't expect praise for doing the right thing, and really not even a thank you, but if I was on the other end of this, I would be thanking the customer for being honest and keeping me out of trouble when my register didn't add up at the end of the day.