alt Hacker NewsI worked in retail for a few years. A very large part of my job was simply keeping physical paper price tags in sync with the database. Minimum wage employees in a back office manually keying in UPCs, etc. The claim is extremely accurate in my experience.
Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.
You have it backwards. Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.
And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.