Never heard of GS1 before, let alone GS1 Sunrise but it's presumably behind an annoying and, one would hope, entirely avoidable frustration in Boots in the UK.

They obviously turned on QR code scanning capability on their tills at some point recently(ish) - I can't recall when but I think it was around a year ago. They turned it on, even though their products use 1D barcodes... And now, whenever a consumer item has a QR code too, the till freaks out when it reads the wrong one! They absolutely could ignore the QR code but their dev managers must care so little that this obvious fix is skipped and their continue to annoy customers needlessly.

Why does it require internet connection to read the 2d barcode though?

1d barcode is not the same as a 1d image, despite the d = dimension.

I hate it.