Dealer requirements aren't new at all, and have been around since at least the '70s. Gibson, no matter who has owned them has always been the worst. Our little store in a college town in the middle of Central Illinois had a Gibson rep tell us we needed to have an L-5 and either a Super 400 or a Super 5 (? it was supposed to have the best features of the Super 400 and the L-5). The only thing Gibson made that our customers wanted were Les Pauls, SGs, and some ES-335. But to get those we were supposed to have a Dobro, an F-5 repro Mandolin, etc. etc. Decades later the last Gibson dealer in town dropped them for the same reasons- they were a five store chain and the annual commitment went from what the whole chain had sold the year before to that dollar amount per store. Plus, 40% of the hooks had to be Gibson/Epiphone product, and an additional commitment for Gibson-branded accessories.
Now part of this is understandable- I hate that every Fender dealer seems to have a hundred black MIM Standard Strats with maple necks, 25 MIM Teles, five Standard Jazz basses, and a single P bass. But never any of the Vintage Series stuff, nor more than one American Series. They have to be able to represent the line in order to be a dealer. But the annual commitments also have to reflect the stores' markets, which they too often ignore.
John