Thanks, I continued looking further into it as well and found another article on it, which states:

Retailers reported a 93% increase in annual shoplifting incidents in 2023 compared to 2019.

So I believe you are right. Guess op proves that often you can have either interesting text with poorly supported numbers, or boring text with well supported facts. Too bad though, cause i did actually enjoy reading the article (so extra shout-out to op for sharing).