A 21-year-old man was charged with murder last week after shooting another man in the parking lot of a Walmart in Auburn, Me. At the retailer’s store in North Bergen, N.J., a woman squirted pepper spray at people around the customer service desk in February, temporarily blinding some employees and customers. She then retreated into a back room, wielding a knife and shouting obscenities.

And on Monday a customer grabbed a kitchen knife off a shelf, began unwrapping it and threatened an employee, prompting an evacuation of a Walmart in Marietta, Ga. A few weeks ago, a man was arrested at the same store, accused of trying to kidnap a 9-year-old from the bathroom.

Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, with more than 4,000 sprawling stores dotted across every region of the United States. And partly because it operates in so many places, crime, some of it deadly, seems to follow it.

[Read our live briefing for the latest updates on the Dayton and El Paso shootings]

The shooting at the Walmart in El Paso that killed 22 people on Saturday was the worst episode to happen inside or in the parking lot of one its stores in the company’s history. Police and law enforcement experts have said there was not much Walmart could have done within that store to prevent the gunman from carrying out the massacre. But it has placed renewed attention on why the retailer has historically been the scene of so much crime, and whether the company has done enough to deter it.