This is less than 3 weeks before official launch, I'm not surprised it happened at all. When I used to work in an independent game store and we would get a high profile title in (usually 1-3 weeks before launch) I would visit every other VG store in the city and talk to employees fishing for an idea of when pre-orders would start shipping, as soon as one store did it we would follow suit. Perfect Dark was a big one I remember, I think we let that one go about 10 days early.
We sold grey imports (I was living in the UK at the time) so we often had Japanese or US versions of games long before the PAL release, in those cases, where the import game was easily available in the UK (most Dreamcast stuff for example) we would sell the PAL release the day it arrived in store, regardless of release date.