This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...
I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop.
Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not possible, because all the laptops had Office pre-installed. I told him i did not care and wanted to buy the laptop for the adverstised price.
After 15 minutes of discussion, some manager came frustrated what the problem was. I pointed to the price tag and told him i wanted to buy the laptop for that price exactly and if that was possible. It was, but it would require uninstalling Office, which took them another 15 minutes.
So i waited for another 15 minutes so they could remove Office. Back at home i powered on the laptop, popped in a usb disk and removed every partition that its harddisk ever had and started a nice fresh install without any bloatware.
We would preinstall office on say 80% of the door buster laptops for something like $29. Most people used office so they’d pay it. Occasionally some people didn’t want it so they’d buy a bare laptop.
If all the bare laptops had been sold, we’d remove office from one of the preinstalled laptops. Then we’d take the box and send it back to the inventory guys to process and get credit back from the vendor. As part of that process we were supposed to verify to Microsoft that the product wasn’t installed on any machines.
So they weren’t tracking keys, but the manager wasn’t doing it to spite the OP, he was just doing what the vendor asked for.