Why do some dealers

1- A dealer is expected to meet certain quarterly sales objectives by the manufacturer. If he doesn't, the company may drop the dealer and give the line to another dealer in the same sales area. I was a customer of one N. California dealer who lost ARC for this exact reason.

2- Sometimes, try as he might, a dealer is simply unable to interest enough customers in a given companys products to justify keeping the brand in the store. I was a customer of one S. California dealer who dropped Rowland for this reason.

3- Many manufacturers have an extensive product line, ranging in price and performance from entry-level to State-of-the-Art. Some expect or even require its dealers to carry the entire line, others don't. I was a customer of a dealer who wanted to sell the older, economy-model Vandersteens, but at the price point of the upper level models preferred to recommend and sell the Wilson Audio speakers. Understandably, this was not acceptable to Richard, and the two parted ways after having had an excellent working relationship for many years. I thought the dealer had completely blown it, but he was a stubborn guy. RIP, old friend.

Yep taters, Brooks was the dealer in numbers 2 and 3 in my posting above. He was a very opinionated, self-assured guy, but idealistic to a fault. If he sold, say, two speaker lines that both included a $10,000 model, and found one of the speakers to be distinctly superior overall to the other, he didn't feel he could in good conscience recommend both to his customers. Were I a dealer, I would have no problem demoing both, and letting the customer choose between two excellent speakers. But hey, Brooks was the very successful dealer, not me!

Here's something else to keep in mind about the above scenario. The more of a given company's product a retailer sells, the more of a valued account is he considered to be. If this hypothetical dealer sells $500,000 a year of each company's $10,000 model (approximately a pair of each per week---very doable), he may be considered by each company to be a mid-level account. If he instead sells $1,000,000 a year of just one of those speakers, he may be considered a high-level account by that speaker's company. $1,000,000 in sales a year may entitle the dealer to purchase product from that company at a lower wholesale price, and to be eligible for co-op advertising (the dealer and the company splitting the cost of a full page ad in Stereophile, in which the speaker is advertised).

Then there is the matter of "New! Hot!". A dealer can take either a short-term view of his product lines and clientele, or a long-term one. Randy Cooley at Optimal Enchantment in Santa Monica, California chose long-term, and has been an ARC/Vandersteen/Audioquest dealer for a long time. He has a very happy, loyal clientele as a result. The short-term retailer grabs every new hot component, sells as much of it as he can, and then moves on to the next one that comes down the pike (pike? God I sound old). If I bought a pair of $10,000 speakers, and six months later the dealer had dropped the line and was now selling and raving about his new $10,000 offering (bad-mouthing the old speaker, if only implicitly), I would not be happy. Not that a dealer can't add to his product line, or drop lines that are no longer competitive, but not in a constantly changing fashion.

Just as a footnote: The dealer in my example number 1 was an excellent dealer, he just couldn't meet ARC's sales requirement of their accounts. But to show you what kind of guy Bill Johnson was, he allowed the dealer to keep his ARC customers, to sell them any and all future ARC products they wanted to buy from that dealer. That's class.