I was hoping/expecting someone would chime in from an “I worked at Wal*Mart” perspective… 
Thanks for the insight.
Naturally, the larger the scale of an operation, the greater the potential for (massive) f*ckups. My retail experience has been in (comparatively) very small businesses. In those settings, even very small amounts of stalled product were harmful, and rapidly noticed. Say that I overbought on frozen turkeys for thanksgiving. Every extraneous bird would be a noted drag on my department margin, and I’d be under considerable pressure to move them at any workable price. And this was at least partly only seen through deduction; there was some matching/feedback from our computerized point-of-sale system, but all detective work was on me and the accounting department.
So, our automated systems could help raise a red flag, but it was up to the meatbags to actually see it and suss out a source. That’s why I have a hard time seeing a supposedly tightly-run ship like a big box store running into this sort of problem, at least at this extreme. I can see the initial goof-up happening, but I have a hard time imagining how it could persist that long. Eight-to-ten weeks, maybe, but not eight-to-ten years. I’m still leaning towards irresponsible behavior, if not malicious intent…
And anyway, don’t globe-spanning super-retailers like Wal*Mart typically have buy-back arrangements?
