Policies that encourage piracy...

So being home, I have both time and access to a car. I decide to drive to my local EB Games/Gamestop to pic up a recent release:Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. I peer through their remarkably limited selection of PC games and note many old, bad games amongst their collection. I mean, if they still have the individual expansions for BF1942, they've got to have the latest and best 4/5X Strategy game out there, right? What may be the best game of it's type since MoO2?
Nope.
Apparently they only got a single one. This game is great, has been getting rave reviews etc, and they still have old crappy 2+ year old games sitting on the shelves that will end up being thrown out, likely, while good new games are denied shelf space. Likely corporate figures that since the old games aren't selling, it isn't worth it to ship them any new games.
I then asked about another excellent, recent strategy game release. Turns out they have 5 copies in the back; all defective. And, so they claim, since they still have '5' in inventory, they won't get shipped anymore.

So here I am for a week. If I buy the game online it won't ship for at least a day, and then it'll be 2-3 days minimum for it to get here, yielding maybe 2-3 days worth of play time before I go back to CMU. Totally not worth $40-$50.
What options does this leave me? Piracy, really. All because of piss-poor distribution, all the while corporate is likely being more convinced by the minute that noone's buying PC games anymore.
It's sorta like Hollywood/MPAA/RIAA complaining about piracy killing ticket/CD sales when it's really sucktastic movies/music.

Well, game publishers/distributors, let it be known that you were going to receive 40 of my hard-earned dollars, but now you won't. I'll just reinstall Rome and go massacre some Goths (as in Visi- not spikes and black mascara).