See, this is where it does get difficult. Baby formula is popular because its resellable. In fact there has been a time, and I don't know if that's still ongoing, where there were issues with baby formula in China, some of it got poisoned in some way. So Chinese parents started distrusting Chinese-made baby formula. This opened a market for reselleing non-Chinese baby formula to Chinese customers.
If you look online you can see lots of articles for example showing that in Australia Chinese resellers bought up all the baby formula stores had on the shelf, with the only goal to resell it.
Now I don't know how many tried to just steal it instead, but that number is surely not 0. So if a shop only has 3 packages left and a person is trying to steal all of them, it might not be for their baby, if they even have one.
If we are talking about other products, bread, potatoes, rice... I agree with you. Baby formula... is difficult.