Many posters in this thread seem to think that the Global HQ is broken. They are wrong. It is working precisely the way EA intends. It is shackled by design.
When you start playing the game, HQ operates as you expect, with only a few items being difficult to acquire. The more you build up your city, the harder it becomes to obtain the items you need via HQ.
However... If we could get whatever we want, I would have opened up all my regions long ago and enlarged my local storage to hold as much as possible and would soon be finished the game. There would be no challenge if everything was easy to get. I don't agree with the trickery inside Global HQ, because this deceit is an enormous time-waster and incredibly frustrating, but it's the way the game slows down our progress.
There should be a better way. It might be useful to know how many items I could obtain per hour or per day, so I could plan my own progress rather than be shackled to an invisible limitation. But it isn't broken.
They know exactly what they are doing. They're trying to encourage us to spend real money. This is probably vacuuming money out of little rich kids' credit cards.
