Super surprised the store owner was okay with this. If simply standing in the way of demolition androids is a capital offense, stealing them has to be as well. Here's hoping this doesn't come back to bite them
I think it's less that the value of the robots is so high, and more that human life is incredibly cheap. As we've seen from the previous chapters, it seems like these insane combat robots are so cheap to mass produce that no one really blinks if they get exploded or go missing. Stealing a robot is like stealing a traffic cone, sure you aren't supposed to do it and it probably counts as a crime, but the value of the traffic cone itself isn't high enough to pursue you actively over it.
They got their finances in order so some rich bureaucrat doing the paperwork probably shrugged and moved on. The fact that the robots can kill indiscriminately for even the slightest inconvenience is basically just a showcase of how little human flesh and blood matters.
The robots themselves are treated as disposable, so what does that say about the humans who are worth less than robots?