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.
