Do you really think the Product Owner at target didn't think someone might buy something at one store and need to bring it back to another store? Or did they just choose to make this more difficult?
I've got a few friends who are unfortunate enough to work in call centers for a large satellite company. They are constantly forced to treat customers like crap and if the customer complains to put blame on the system. Not the managers/executives who came up with the rules that the customer is having trouble with, but the computer system. It is used as a shield/excuse for shitty policies
It seems like you're saying the system must be adhered to. Otherwise why would the system not matching reality matter? That the system must be adhered to is not a given, and is in fact the exact problem being created by middle managers.
Middle management doesn't decide it any more, or less then the engineers do.
They order a system, the engineers build it, nobody, including the engineers, has a perfect understanding of the problems that the system is supposed to solve, so it doesn't 100% map to the real world. Nobody understands which parts of the system don't map well to the real world, so they don't design a process for dealing with the system's shortcomings.
The responsibility for this failure is collective.