Shoplifting, maybe. Employee theft, no. The Hasidim already have the world's best deterrent to employee theft: you are banned for life from the community. Period. No warnings. No discussion.
Imagine if wall street had that rule.
Most of their store inventory is in the basement warehouse (and plenty of other inventory must be off-site entirely). There's simply no other way of fulfilling that much volume in a real-time retail environment.
Edit: hmmm wait, this tab was obviously already open for quite some time... a dozen comments have materialized, including some I'm now duping. Sorry.
More randomness for the hell of it: I read the Yiddish Policemen's Union the other week and cannot recommend it highly enough. (It's a noir detective alt-history set in a Jewish analogue of Hong Kong in Alaska, where the local organized crime are Hasidic, the slang name for them is "black hats.") (It also manages to be a page-turner without any of that guilty feeling of "I just read 300 pages without thinking a single original thought" that so many page-turners leave you with.)
Would you be willing to risk everything important to you, not just your job, but your family, friends, home, and community, on the chance that someone may have seen you take a $5 item?
Sex outside of marriage is much more frowned-upon in the Hasidic community than petty theft, and yet there are Hasidim who have been caught soliciting prostitutes.
Think about yourself. You have certain principles which in moments of weakness are violated.
I, in principle, go to sleep early. Here I am posting at 10:17PM (South African time) on Hacker News. Principle violated. People are only human.
(including that snotty bastard in the studio lighting department-- B&H salespeople can be a little brusque)
I've probably spent upwards of $10k there over the years-- just bought $200 in grip on Sunday.