Well to be fair I don't truly know how widespread a phenomenon it is. But where I live, and surrounding cities, stores have been upping security a lot in the last year. Where before you could simply walk in and out, now there's fencing/corraling at entrances and checkouts, Security guards at entrances, big obvious cameras on self checkout that rub it in your face by showing you on screen your recording. At first it was just Walmart, but slowly other places like grocery stores and such have adopted it. They treat us like dangerous criminals just to prevent a little loss. Meanwhile they continually inflate prices and rake in record profits. No wonder shoplifting is up.