[ThinkDifferent]

...and we're not interested in what you're doing at home. We care only about the movement of material from point of make to point of sale.

Which makes perfect sense. But what I don't understand is that this entire issue could be defused if the tags were deactivated when the product is purchsed by the customer, and nobody seems interested in doing that.

[The Red Zone]

There's the gnarly issue of how returns are handled. This would require chip reactivation, or insertion of new chip.