Vertically integrated Consumer Electronics Show list prices Service Merchandise Compute! Atari Texas Instruments TI-99/4A
Vertically integrated, Commodore lowered the retail price of the C64 to $300 at the June 1983 Consumer Electronics Show, and stores sold it for as little as $199. At one point the company was selling as many computers as the rest of the industry combined. Commodore—which even discontinued list prices—could make a profit when selling the C64 for a retail price of $200 because of vertical integration. Competitors also reduced prices; the Atari 800's price in July was $165, and by the time Texas Instruments was ready in 1983 to introduce the 99/2 computer—designed to sell for $99—the TI-99/4A sold for $99 in June. The 99/4A had sold for $400 in the fall of 1982, causing a loss for Texas Instruments of hundreds of millions of dollars. A Service Merchandise executive stated, "I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this." Such low prices probably hurt home computers' reputation; one retail executive said of the 99/4A, '"When they went to $99, people started asking 'What's wrong with it?'" The founder of Compute! stated in 1986 that "our market dropped from 300 percent growth per year to 20 percent".
