I work at HomeGoods and our company is a bunch of *******, tbh.
Even if you said "I'm going to steal these" to an employee we couldn't do anything about it. We don't have censors on our doors so you could walk out with a product and we wouldn't even know it.
Also, they only check our cameras the days our district manager is making her rounds.
And finally, you can return something you broke/damaged if it's within 7 days. The store that is like 10 miles away from us has a lower sales tax so a lot of people steal from that store and return the items at our store. Even if that store calls us and tells us they got stolen from and the people come to our store and return it we HAVE to return it on store credit.
One time, we got a call from the other store and a whole family just walked straight out with expensive knifes and expensive kitchen accessories. Twenty minutes later one girl comes in and returns it all and she got like 2000$ worth of store credit and then she goes outside and comes right back in with her whole family and they all go shopping. It was so annoying but there was nothing we could do. My manager didn't even do anything.
We keep track of our returns by entering ID info and a person can only return up to 5000$ a year. But with the size of her family, that is no problem, they probably just have a different person return them each time.