Kind of, though:
In the past stores had Loss Prevention departments which were tasked with this stuff. It's never been the case that nobody shop lifted, its just now that the economic race has led retailers to externalize and cut costs.
It's very, very annoying to have some mall cop following you around, so now its a camera, later it will be many more and much better cameras with a lower paid employee with much less engagement with their occupation. I reject that it is an impossible task for national retailers.
I suspect walmart has a workable model: They move stocking into the shopping hours and use all of their employees as a micro-scale surveillance network.
Why should society foot the bill for for police and such to watch private property like this and essentialy persecute the population because the national retailers don't want to invest in the cost of doing business?
Inside of a store, it's completely reasonable and totally possible to just have an employee around.
Policing organized crime is the job of the FBI, if my knowledge of this stuff is a little bit correct. All of this surveillance garbage we've been ignoring for decades was supposed to solve these problems, but it is clearly not capable of doing so.