I suspect the actual local optimum in this vicinity is to have such a rule and announce explicitly that no one will be looking for, or caring about, small benign violations. But that might turn out to spoil things legally in the rare cases where it matters.

Including legal concerns, the local optimum is probably officially stating that response will be proportional to seriousness of the 'theft', with a stated possible maximum. This essentially dog-whistles that small items are free to take, without giving an explicit pass.

A better optimum might be what some tech company (I thought Twitter but can't find my source) that changed their policy on expense accounts for travel/food/etc. to 'use this toward the best interests of the company', to significant positive results. But some of the incentives there (in-house travel-agent arrangements are grotesquely inefficient) are missing here.