I’ll say if this is a family run place - it’s still a dick move. If it’s Lowes, Home Depot, or Menards, eh who cares.
Depends. If you weren’t going to buy it anyway, it doesn’t cost them anything. And if you’re grabbing a fallen leaf hoping for something, it seems like you aren’t all that interested anyway.
Just to add some context, succulents are ridiculously easy to propagate from a fallen leaf. You literally just put them somewhere until they sprout roots and stick that in a pot. Takes a week, two max. That said, succulents also take years to mature. Your little sprouted leaf is going to stay small for about 2 years and by 4 or 5 it’ll look decent. So it may be “theft”, but by the time you’ve gotten a plant that’s on par with the one you got a leaf from, years will have passed and you’ll have likely spent money on pots, soil, and fertilizer from the same store you “stole” from. It’s like pinching a small bottle of paint from a craft store then turning around and spending $100 on canvasses and brushes
I only know about Menards because of random factoids, references, and memes. Frankly speaking I have just found out they have plants and are maybe a hardware store.
They’re like a hardware store that has plants, couches, mattresses, food, all sorts of stuff. It’s wild.
So a a big box general store? Of fucking couse the midwest would create such a thing.