Idk if this is actually the case.
When I worked in customer service, people would ask me to look for things that I knew we didn't have, I would then pretend to look and tell them "we're out". I suspect that they did the same. Knew they had it, didn't have the resources to look for it and knew they'd turn up, but offered some compensation. It would probably cost them more money to find that particular package than it would be to just wait for it to come up.
That's all hearsay by me who has no idea what actually happened.