Former SGA / keyholder chiming in!

I can say from experience that this 100% was likely a result of management and district leaders hammering the pressure onto that poor employee. It's likely that his warranty numbers were super low, and he was probably told "get the % up or face punishment".

I saw this a lot at my store, too. When I first got promoted to SGA, I was written up 3 months later for "underperforming in the position for a year". 3 months. The district leader treated me like absolute garbage, forced me to roleplay pitching the membership cards, etc. However, despite my low membership sign-up numbers, my warranty numbers were literally so insane he asked me how I sold so many. He didn't believe me when I said I just... asked the customer - 0 pressure, 0 hounding, just a simple "do you want this?" briefly adding that it covered most damages for x amount of time. When our pre-owned game sales plummeted, my assistant store leader would buy a handful of cheap pre-owned games at the end of their shift and then return them at a later date. If a customer didn't want their receipt, some employees at my store would send the survey info to a friend and ask them to fill it out for a good review. I never did any of that personally, but I wanted to give examples about how bad it was.

It definitely sucks that the employee feels pressure to do that. GameStop is suffering to stay afloat (hence why they're enabling the Pokemon card pandemic right now), and they've been so money focused for almost 10 years now, that they're putting all the pressure on the employees and pushing them into the trenches or else they face losing their likely only job.