I wasn't previously ill disposed towards Whole Foods, but this sort of idiocy makes me want to avoid them. What a pretentious load of crap. What on Earth is this company trying to achieve with this policy? Avoid theoretical lawsuits by shoplifters, who might claim they were hurt when employees attempted to stop them?

If this company had any moral fibre at all, it would stand behind the justified actions of its employee, instead of terminating his employment on Christmas Eve.

Also, this guy (a habitual shoplifter who's become good at it) needs to get a clue about what the word 'job' means:
You say [shoplifting is] a necessity, so you don’t feel any moral guilt about stealing? Absolutely not, it’s a job like any other job; it requires professionalism, requires effort, requires time. It’s not an easy thing. And there's a certain amount of risk, like any venture that you get into, any business you get into.
If we've come to the point where people think that ripping people off is what a job consists of, so therefore shoplifting is much like "any other job", then we need a dire economic depression indeed, if we hope to get rid of this kind of attitude. There's nothing like the brutality of nature to make people realize that we do need each other to survive and to succeed, after all; and that, in the long run, cheating other people is much like eating your own hand off.