Agreed. This is asinine. During peak times they get dozens of these things and would have to spend hours of labor manually updating each one when they should be selling them. No business would operate like that. It adds no value at all. Further, no customer would want a store to open the product they are paying 300 bucks for to do anything to it at all. How many consoles were sold by Gamestop in the last year? Say it was 1/2 a million switches. How long would it take to update all of them, 8 minutes? Maybe they could cut that down if they had several TVs to 5 minutes. So it would cost 2.5 million minutes in labor. At 8 bucks an hour that would cost GS $333k across the stores. What kind of moron of a manager would agree to that. Add in the PS4s and XBOs and it will cost over 1 mil per year. It is not happening.
It is likely that they update and wipe all used systems and somehow this led to the rumor that they do this for all new ones too.