At first I wondered this too. Just going based on what Sir Alan SAID, I can see how easy it would be to misconstrue this task as "come back with the most money".

But it WAS made clear later than they got a brief. And I have NO doubt that brief was specific.

So... they screwed up. And deserved to be chewed out.

Actually it makes a lot of sense. If the task is I understand it, it's rather complex and challenging and presents an interesting dilemma. Do you try and sell as much as you can (obviously trying to avoid selling for peanuts while you do) or do you try to identify "key" items and sell those for as high a price as possible? Which items should you try and get valued? Do you read the brief properly? (Ah, the benefit of hindsight and/or common sense.) I can see this task being of some value in the future as it seems to combine sales with strategy.

Yes, in this instance, a team could have gone to the pub, let the other team implode and won by default but there is no way any intelligent team leader would have relied on that even had they understood the task properly. Nobody could or should have relied on the other team making a loss and any team leader doing so (or any team member going along with sucha strategy unquestioningly) would have their cards marked for the future. They wouldn't have been fired on this task going by the rules but they'd have had to seriously impress in later weeks to even think about surviving any future boardroom. Anyone who knows the parable of the talents may see some parallel here...

It's quite sad that that even needs to be pointed out to them.

Especially after tha shopping debacle last year.

I think people are making the point that either team could have done that and won. That's certainly what I was thinking way back when I posted this thread:

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...217&highlight=



Any team [leader] intelligent enough to work out how the task worked would have seen that selling nothing would have a good chance of winning given the difficulty of selling things for their true value. However, that doesn't mean that they would then choose to sit in the pub, as a better strategy would be to go out and try and sell things for more than their value. As they might get lucky and show fighting spirit at the same time - unambiguously a better strategy.

But I think it's still worthy of discussing that sitting in the pub doing nothing would have won this task.

I understood the task was to try to sell everything, but to make sure that they sold everything for the highest price they could get, hence making sure they valued all the most valuable items, correctly. I did think it was a selling task too, and thought the winners would be those who brought home the highest amount of money. IF the rules of how the task would be won were in the dossier they were given, then no excuses - but how would we know this??

I think the producers should have done more to make sure the candidates understood the task.

It's all very well to say that they should have read the brief more carefully (although we haven't actually seen that brief so we can't even be certain that it made the rules clear), but they obviously didn't and thus the task was undertaken in entirely the wrong way.

If the teams had understood it would have been a far better test of intelligence and analytical thinking than what we got.

Of course, I have a definite suspicion that the teams were intended to misunderstand the task so that the audience could laugh at their foul ups.

I suspect the producers thought that would be more entertaining than the rather demanding job of understanding a strategy for winning the intended task (an optimal strategy for which is all but impossible given the time constraints and formatting rules).

Yeah, I mean no team would have gone to the pub, but the best strategy would have been to only, only sell items when they knew it would be profitable to do so.

The James Bond book for example was a winner. Probably easy to sell, and to sell for a profit. If they had identified the shoes, probably as well, as no doubt you could easily find some vintage clothing shop.

The rug was a difficult one though, i would have left that unsold.

That depends on how they were valued by SAS, when we saw the book being sold the owner of the shop said something like, I'll give you £80 and sell it for £160, so were the items valued at retail price in which case it was almost impossible to make a profit, or trade price, or some arbitrary price.

The only sensible strategy for this task was to get everything valued and then not sell anything for less than the value, even if that meant you sold nothing at all, as long as you spent the day trying.

I may have missed that bit, or it may have been edited out. But if I had been on the task, as soon as I had market stall and shop people telling me that they didn't have the customers for that sort of rug, I'd be asking them how much it was worth and where I could try selling it. Same for the commode.

I'd agree that if the items were valued at full retail price, that it would have been impossible to make a profit. But they did make a profit on some items. So, I'd guess the valuations would have been an estimate of what the items would be sold for. For example, the bookshop said £80 at first for the book. Didn't they negotiate that up to £100.

Which is why it was a poor task. It would all depend on what the 'cost' of the items was, which was (presumably) unknown.

If you were just led into a room with 10 items, and asked 'which can you sell at a profit', it would be extremely difficult, becuase you have no idea of costs. The book could have been brought for £20-£30, or £80-$100....

I think it was a poorly designed task, as it was strutured around having poor no/information. Of course thats dependant on what the written briefs they were given contained.

But did he not say that after the task was over and it was too late?

It was an episode of Bargain Hunt

oh how my finger almost went to type "C" as Debra flashed through my brain while typing the programme above!

But this is precisely why they failed - half the task was to find the value of the goods, the other was to sell the goods taking into account what they now knew the goods to be worth.
But the teams failed to do the first half of the task and so had no idea of what the sell for in the second...

It was a very well deisgned task contructed to test them and both teams totally failed

Yes they were not given the value of the items. Establishing the value was a key part of the tasks and that was clear in the brief they were given.

Having the value of the items also gives you where the potential market is.

Both teams had no idea of the value so just hawked them around street markets.

An obvious strategy would be to get the goods valued by an auction house. That would tell you what items had real value.

This was perhaps the only task in the history of the Apprentice where one team could have won by not selling a single thing.

By not selling a single item, the team would have incurred zero losses and still retained whatever assets they had at the start, and would therefore have won.