It's interesting to hear that public perception but I worked for a dealer here in Michigan for nearly 5 years and this is what I remember about it.
Originally Commodore sold Pets to businesses and schools. You had to be a "PET" dealer to sell these monster metal behemoths. When the Vic-20 and C=64 came along at $300 and $600 respectively these were sold initially at dealers. Commodore made deals with retailers to sell these mass market during the holiday buying season which was so successful, they let their dealer network go by the wayside.
Commodore tried to revive the "business" market by offering the hardware to "Amiga Dealers" including some older Commodore 8-bit dealers. Commodore dealers survived on repairs and specialized software and hardware that wasn't sold elsewhere, because when the C=64 entered Toys R Us and Kmart dealers couldn't get them at the same quantity pricing that the big retailers were doing. Most left the market or kept hoping the dealers and the education dealers would get new hardware..
When the A1000 came along many dealers were upgraded to be Amiga dealers. The a1000 was supposed to be the business machine that multitasked and put the PC business in the box. The only problem is no business software actually existed at the time and it took Commodore a long time to get a stable operating system (version 1.1).. Stable also didn't mean functional.. When the Amiga was announced Lotus even came up and announced 1-2-3 for it and never delivered. A work a-like showed up about 1.5 years later with no where near the graphics 1-2-3 had been suggested to had..
Commodore realized that they needed to cost reduce the machine to stay competitive and they needed a more "consumer friendly" box to attract the folks on 6502s. At $1295 the A1000 just didn't hit the price point..
So a year passes the A500 and 2000 is announced the A2000 fixed PC compatibility issues of it's day with the "Bridgeboard" About that time they started showing up at mass retailers with the A500..
Before this happened though, a local dealership was given the right to sell refurbished A1000s at a cheaper price. This had two effects. 1) The other dealers couldn't compete or sell the volume and more expensive A1000s stayed on dealer shelves waiting for price drops and software to arrive..
Commodore gets version 1.2 of the OS ready and releases with the A500/2000 which has a greatly cost reduced board incorporating many CSG (Commodore SemiConductor Group) support chips. Many not seen on the A1000.
The A500 and 2000 puts the kibosh on A1000 sales. It finally puts the refurb dealer out of business. The reason the refurbs happened is Commodore got a number of non working a1000s back and they factory repaired and sent them back out..
The dealers at least have a big seller in A2000s..
C=128s continued sales and the 8 bit market was still strong until the 90s as a beginning computer. The Amiga never totally replaced that strategy.
The point is just to say Commodore didn't treat it's dealers well and caused problems for them, some just trying really hard to survive..
There was no professional marketing in the USA.. Most efforts were done on price and that was a joke. Also competition with the various "versions" of Commodore in different countries was problematic though too..They were all independent mostly from each others management.
