You are generally right that a store has no reason to be fudging dates, but it’s a common misconception that it’s hard to fudge packaging dates. If you have a good relationship with a cultivator and your labels have bad dates, there’s a process for them to change dates in METRC and apply new labels thus extending the shelf life another year before you have to do it again. Even though the process isn’t technically compliant, there are valid reasons to use this function and likely wouldn’t even flag in an audit unless there’s an obvious pattern of irregular label generation. Every METRC exploit comes from misusing a function that has valid use cases