I was just thinking about this. It is clear that Walmart's clientele is different than Target's. My curiosity is around why that would be. When I've visited Walmarts in upscale neighborhoods, there is generally a Target within a few miles. The difference in culture from the surrounding neighborhood is so huge that I wonder if they bus in the people to go to Walmart.

Most major retailers have loss prevention departments. Their job is to find ways to prevent theft. Based on the article, Walmart is not employing very many of these techniques. In a colloquial sense, that's inviting crime. If someone leaves their door open and announces they're going on vacation, they're inviting crime. By not employing effective loss prevention techniques and using the police as their crime prevention, Walmart is inviting crime.

It may make sense to Walmart's culture to operate this way, but I'm not convinced that it makes financial sense. For all the hours that it takes a police officer to respond to a theft, it also takes a Walmart employee's time to deal with the incident. That employee gets paid for that time. If the police hours are that high, then the Walmart employee hours are high as well. If Walmart used that money that they would have used to pay those employees, they could pay a loss prevention consultant team to find ways to reduce the theft or pay a security company to patrol.

I don't know what you think I believe about the bottom line. I did read the $15B profit figure. Would it have been more or less than that figure if there was a good loss prevention plan in place?

In my comparison of Target and Walmart, I was looking at the article linked in my comment that stated that in the first quarter of 2015, the net income margin was 3.7% for Target vs. 2.9% for Walmart. For the same time period, revenue growth for Target was .4% while Walmart's revenue growth was negative .1%.