What we see is cut down and edited for effect, I'm sure it's rarely the same as what's in the written dossier the teams get.

If there was any significant mis-direction there would be uproar in the boardroom.

Yes, you are 100% (or as they seem to say nowadays on reality tv, you are ONE MILLION PER CENT, FOUR YESSES) correct.

I had wondered about that when watching the programme, but thought maybe I'd missed something.

Good post.

PS - sorry, "four yesses" is a completely different programme, isn't it???

You really do not understand. Its about making a profit not a loss. If the teams could not understand that fundermental then they will never be any good.

Suger put great emphasis on valuing the items. Even an idiot should see the importence of that. If you dont know the value how can you come up with a selling price?

No, you really don't understand.

There is no dispute that the way the task was scored (and thus, presumably the way the task's designers intended it to work), was about profit. That is accepted. There is no argument about that.

The point of this thread is that Sugar misdirected the candidates when he said: "The team that comes back with the highest amount of sales will win".

Do you understand that 'amount of sales' is revenue?
Do you not understand the difference between revenue and profit.

Sugar told them that the task would be judged on revenue wheras it was actually judged on profit.

Hence they were misdirected.


Again, quite true but completely irrelevant to this thread.

Even if it had been judged as AS said it would you would still need to come up with the correct values.

This isn't real life though, it's a specific task set up for a tv show.

A lot of the viewers plus seemingly all of the candidates themselves appear to have misunderstood the rules, so there must have been a mismatch somewhere.

Must admit the distinction passed me by entirely until reading this thread. I had assumed (based on SirAlan's verbal brief) that their objective was to generate the maximum revenue/sales - ergo selling all items even at a loss would be the best strategy. But it did strike me that the game would be won or lost by what you could get for the high value items.

However, if the task was about *profit* then selling any item below your estimation of its value would be counter-productive. The the main business of the day would then have to be valuing the items. At which point lack of internet access would make the task unrealistically difficult and frustrating. If it was reallly scored on profit based on the items's true values then it's no wonder everyone was up a gum tree and that both teams made a loss.

As viewers we don't get to see the written brief so it's hard to tell what really went on!

He also said there was a twist. The candidates should have looked in the brief for a twist.

Do you know for sure that some of the items were left unsold? Because if they weren't, it means the result was uneffected. It's just that a constant value (ie the nominal cost of the items) got subtracted from each team's takings.

In most of these tasks, what Sir Alan says at the start is more for the viewers than for the candidates. They are generally given a lot more detail in a written brief, which they ignore at their peril.

In the related task a few years ago, where they had to acquire items, there was a fine for missing an item out, but it was quite low. Adam foolishly didn't pay attention to the brief and ended up losing more than the fine would have been.

In the related task last year, in Marrakesh, Claire famously did read the brief and realised they'd made a mistake in time to fix it.

Many good points have been made in this thread. I'll just add another vote for the teams being misdirected. It may not have been deliberate, but I too assumed all the way through that it would be the team that made the most in simple total sales that won.

Yes, we'd figured that out.

(Assuming the written brief gave an accurate description of the task. We have no way of knowing that Sugar himself didn't take the task description from there.)

However, the fact that he misdirected them also meant that he misdirected the audience.

It was a stupid ploy, whether it was deliberate or accidental because it made far less obvious the degree to which they were cocking up. Also, if it had been pointed out to them more obviously it would have completely changed the way the task would have to be handled and given us a far better idea of the thinking ability of the candidates.


This thread isn't about saying the result was wrong. It was simply pointing out that AS misdirected the teams and also the audience.


Exactly!

This was a stupid task, full stop. I only twigged in the board-room, that it was the difference between the 'real-cost' and the 'selling-cost' which would be the important thing, and not the actual amount it sold for.

Up to that point, I, along with probably most people probably though it was only the overall sales which mattered, and that the valuation of the expensive items was onyl to identifly which they could sell for more.

Of course that doesn't excuse the canditates, which had access to the written rules which no doubt laid this out.

As said above, the best course of action was probably to sit around and do nothing, as that would actually have won you the task.

Silly task. No wonder both Ben and Phil hated it...

But my understanding of this is that if they hadn't sold an item, then obviously they get no revenue, but in the case of the rug, they'd make a loss of £200 as they failed to sell it.

Either way you look at it, whether it be profit or revenue, the winner is the same because as both teams had the same amount of money spent on them to get the items, whoever sold for the highest combined total would win.

I can't say I understand where some people are coming from with this argument

I believe Norul said on "You're Fired" that Ben was surprised that Phillip came back with some items unsold. Also you can see two little china dogs sat on Mona's lap in a cardboard box when the teams were returning at the end of the day (in the scene where Phillip says Lorraine never mentioned the rug all day). The same china dogs were seen with the items at the start (although they were never mentioned explicitly in the episode)

Just for facts sake.

In my opinion Phillip read the rules and understood them - he just wrote the carpet off as tat without valuing it and so was prepared to flog it for a low price, which was a major mistake.

Ben clearly hadn't read the rules at all.

There seem to be a numbr of posters on here that had the same difficulty understanding the clear brief they were given.

There were more then enough clues. What they should have done is valued the goods and not guess at it.
They could then focus on selling the items of real value
knowing the real value would also identify the market to sell them to.

The task was clearly not about getting the most revenues but about making the most profit.

I think there's a possiblity, if you didn't have the rules in front of you, that you could think the "valuation" and "hidden gem" part of the task was not related to the way the results were worked out, but to identifying secretly valuable items that might appear cheap. Thus allowing you to sell them for larger amounts of money, within the boundaries of a task where total turnover was all that mattered.

I can see why viewers might have been confused. Ben I don't think has that excuse.

I do think Phillip valued the products, in that he sat down at the beginning and tried to estimate how much each item was worth, and then sold them only if he thought he could get more than that valuation. The problem is that he didn't do it thoroughly enough.

I do accept that that's just my opinion though, because it wasn't really made clear.

That's a very interesting idea.

If it true it shows Philip to be even more of a plonker than otherwise.

If you understood the basis on which the task was going to marked, the absolulte, unbreakable, first rule of your strategy has to be:

Do NOT sell ANYTHING until it has been valued by a trustworthy expert.

If you do you risk losing the task with a single bad sale.

If you have seen the brief they were given, please post a copy because no one here has admitted to seeing one.

Obviously you cannot be talking about the briefing the were given by AS because that was unequivocally wrong.

The task was clearly not about getting the most revenues but about making the most profit.

I've been thinking about this and without seeing the brief we can't even make this assumption:

What we know:

They weren't given all the items for free.
Both teams made a loss

What we don't know:

If the teams had to "pay for" the items they didn't sell.

If they didn't have to pay for the items they didn't sell then it was clearly about profit not revenue, SAS mislead them (us) in his spiel and had a team not sold a thing they would have won.

If they did have to pay for the items they didn't sell then there is a direct link between revenue and profit as both teams' outgoings are the same SAS didn't actually mislead anyone and we're all just arguing semantics.

Either way we'll never know and I vote we just keep on laughing at the incompetent buffoonery and general all round uselessness of the contestants.

If they had not sold anything they would have lost not won

Whilst the items were given to them it was clearly stated they had a value. Thats how the teams mad a loss. If they had no value you could not make a loss.

You're getting confused again.

The point Kris made (and it's a good one) is that we don't know for certain if they had to pay (i.e. the amount was deducted from revenue) for items not sold.

It makes a great deal of difference as if they did then Sugar's description of the task would be correct.

From the team's perspective the difference is that it subtly changes the optimal strategy.

I take the point about AS not distinguishing clearly enough between revenue and profit. I hadn't noticed it at the time and, to be honest, I assumed he meant profit - its what makes him tick!

I got the impression from what AS said in the boardroom that only the stuff they sold was included in the calculations.

So, theoretically, if a team took a gamble that the other team wouldn't make an overall profit then yes, they could have sold nothing and would have been the winners if the other team ended up with a loss. However, it would be a big gamble because the other team would need only a 1p profit to win.

A good point that the antiques expert made on 'You're Fired' was that in the antiques trade, you don't set out to sell items for less than their value. If you can't find a buyer at the right price right now, you don't sell your item right now. You hang on to it until the right buyer does appear. The value is still potentially there.

I think that's the principle they used to score this task. Unsold items did not incur a loss as they still potentially had their future sales value. Only items that were sold for less than their proper value were deducted.

I'm also of the opinion that technically if they had not sold anything, they would have incurred zero losses and would have won the task.

This is unless there was a clause in the written brief that penalised leftover items.

I think that SAS's meaning when he stated that the team that generated the highest amount of sales would win could be misinterpreted but that does not mean that he necessarily misdirected them. My interpretation is that SAS meant that only sales would count towards an eventual total - that is to say, unsold items would count as zero.

I think (assuming that I have interpreted things correctly ) that it was a rather good task. It required planning, decision about strategy and organisation. Was it possible to get all the items valued and still leave a decent amount of time for selling? How do you split your teams to give yourself the best chance? When do you split them? When do you start sending people off to sell - do you wait for all/most/half/a few items to be valued before you do this? When you've got the valuations, do you still try and sell everything or do you concentrate on the cheap items to try and gain an easy profit or the expensive ones to try and make a real killing? It was a task that really required thought and a certain amount of intelligence and nerve. Unfortunately, as neither team seemed to understand what was actually required of them, they showed very little of any of the above. Shame, because done properly, we might have seen certain candidates show some skill (although I wouldn't have been holding my breath).

yes phillip and his team could have just sat in the pub all day and not sold anything, and they would have come out even, therefore winning, there was no penalty in this task for returning with items, sir alan said as much when he said in the car after he gave out his breif, and said i do not expect them to sell all the items, if he had expected them to sell them all he would have then penalised any team returning with items. as in other series if they were penalised for returning items unsold he specifically told them at the beginning, i think this is where they got confused, having watched other series, they would have automatically assumed they would get a fine, they should have read their brief thouroughly

lol think it was just an awful task.