You are doing nothing more than trolling now.

Deliberately trying to misinterpret anything and everything so you can to continue a pointless fight.

Goodnight.

I have to say that is a great post. Paragraph by paragraph:

The programme is indeed limited as to what it can show.

The teams should have read the brief which may well have stated that their starting point was an expense to the perceived value of the goods.

It is possible, using this assumption, to argue that SAS meant exactly what he said.

Both teams were definitely lead by dipsticks with an inflated sense of their own importance, striding around like General Melchett in Blackadder, assuming they knew everything when they actually knew b*gger all.

and I would agree with your opinion of DJW13's post.

Whichever way you look at it, the teams knew what was expected of them and understood the result of the task.

Allowing for editing, Sugar was quite clear. I watched the repeat last night to check! He said there were valuable things and tat mixed up in the piles and that they should value the items - only Lorraine did that with the carpet. Most of these people are sales types, driven by targets, which is why they almost invariably forget about the initial cost of the item. Also, there was no penalty for not selling an item.

that was the thing not made at all clear in the show.

if you were always charge ALL the cost of the items then you should try and sell ALL for whatever you can get (and try and value them)

if not, then you are best not selling anything as

a) there is really not much chance of valuing everything and obtaining the actual value of it (if you sell a book worth £100 to a shop, they will buy for less than £100 to make a mark up when they sell it)

b) therefore best not to sell anything as less risk of selling for undervalue.

And as a task to "work out the best value of an item", well without the internet, why on earth bother? anyone in the real world would research using the internet, not have to phone around many dealers and do phone valuations for many items.

Stupid task really, when as it was, the optimal strategy would be to sell nothing.

That's a strategy that often works on Bargainhunt. Spend as little as possible and expect the other side to lose more money. But it would not make great viewing.

It looked like Philip may have understood the rules, because it looked like his team had the most unsold items. He only undersold 2 items, one of which was the rug, and that was because he didn't realise how valuable it was rather than because he though it OK to sell at any price. Where-as Ben seemed keen to sell everything, and Nooral says on You're Fired he didn't pay enough attention to the brief.

So if the candidates were actively misled, it was Ben's team that suffered rather than Philip's.

I agree 100% with your entire post.

Good on Ben actually for being the only one to realise how stupid the task was.

That's far too simplistic. The task actually had a lot to it - it's just that the teams didn't seem to grasp that. If one team had just sat on their laurels, gone to the pub and sold b*gger all, all the other team would have had to do would be to concentrate their effort into getting one item valued accurately and sold for marginally more than its valuation to win.

This task involved accurate valuation and strategy. Arguably, the teams should have chosen three or four items,split the team down the middle, have each sub-team take two each, ensured they were accurately valued and put all their efforts into selling a few items for the right price.

The reason the task looked rubbish is because neither team grasped it properly or, if they did, put a decent strategy into play properly. Philip may have understood some of the task but the fact that he was willing to take such a risk on the rug shows that his strategy was deeply flawed as well. It only takes a team to get one item completely a*se about face for the whole task to go t*ts up. Philip was lucky that Ben had even less idea than he did!

Except that both teams were able to sell a few items at above their valued price. So it was possible.

However, if you had a item like the rug that you didn't think was worth much, it'd be reasonable not to waste time getting it valued, but only if you didn't sell it all. You need to:[LIST][*]Guess which items are worth the most.[*]Get those valued first.[*]Sell the ones which are, in fact, worth a lot, in order to have the most potential profit.[*]Forget about the ones which are worth little, and instead guess which of the remaining items are worth a lot, and repeat.[/LIST]Selling the rug without knowing its value was a much bigger mistake than merely not knowing its value.

But they weren't (as far as we know) misled because they were as usual given a brief. The edited clips of what What Sir Alan says at the start can mislead only the viewers, not the teams.

All the teams had to do was "RTFM!". I have absolutely no sympathy for them at all.

In previous tasks the teams decided on their own variable costs, then their sales had to cover the cost and then some.

Last week the costs were fixed for both teams, but the valuation put on items by guesstimate would vary. The true cost was unknown. In the face of uncertainty, APPROXIMATE assessment was key to the task. In previous weeks the cost was central to P&L. No reason not to have made the cost by guesstimate central to this task also.

The true cost and market value was unclear, as was the brief given by Siralan, perhaps deliberately. The challenge was to work with uncertainty, to maximise takings and profit, but not to sell a Rembrandt for a fiver. To fill in the blanks where the boss has not filled them in for you. To be resourceful and find the right answer by a variety of means.

It was a test of judgment and initiative.

I find it amazing that the contestents who are supposed to have firly demanding jobs could not grasp what the challange was about.

They were given enough clues. The were pretty much told some of the items were valuable and that they needed to value the items. None of them really valued the items they just guessed at it or relied on street traders to give them a price. Both approaches were doomed to fail. Not one of them had the sense to go to an auction house.

They all prety much tried to value they things as a commodity item.

Just to inject a note of reality here. Iy you think you can walk into an auction house and get an on the spot valuation of ten disparate pieces of fairly low value merchandise you are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Real life is not like 'Lovejoy'. One person cannot be expert in all fields so the stuff would need to be examined by a range of experts and these people are not just lined up waiting for people to parade miscellaneous lots past them.

This task would have been much better from the audience POV if we had known from the outset the exact details of the scoring. We still don't know whether they were charged for items they did not sell. That makes a fairly fundamental difference to the strategy they would need to adopt.

Auction houses are in the business of knowing the value of items. They can quite easilly identify items of value from those that do not have value. If something was really old and valuable they would refer it to an expert.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Anything potentially valuable need to be refered to an expert and they do not have experts in each field on hand the whole time just in case someone walks in off the street with a lot of different types of item.

That is why people who say they should simply have taken the things to an auction house are naive. WIth only one day to do the research and selling there wasn't time.

The average auction house would have been able to value those items in about an hour

If all the experts they needed happened to be on site, maybe. That is unlikely, though. It would have been a daft strategy.

If it had really been that simple Sugar might just as well have told them the item values as they actually started off in an auction house!

Talkback aren't that stupid.

Agreed! Besides, we know that TalkBack do put additional restrictions on the teams that we don't know about; i.e. not being able to use the Net.

I'd have taken the lot straight to Sotheby's - and I imagine the teams wanted to do something similar but were forbidden to.

JJ

I don't think any of the items they had to sell were specialist items, just that some were more valuable than others. A rug for £300 is a pretty good, but averagely priced rug. A reasonable auction house, or even an antique shop could have given them decent valuations, without having to call in experts.

Quite. Auction houses also have computerised lists, giving past prices attained even for humdrum merchandise. It is their business to know what the punters will pay, so that they do not undersell or underpromote their lots, prices on which their commission cut is based. I walked into Sothebys off the street carrying a painting, and it was attributed and valued for me free within 10 minutes.

As for the programme not revealing the Sugar valuations right from the start, giving out all such numbers from the start would rather turn an exciting programme into a bean-counting exercise. They did say from the start that the rug was valued at £200.

Both teams ended up trying to offload the bulky rug rolled up concealing the chief and only selling point of any rug, trying to flognit to casual passers-by in the street --

"Pssst, fancy buying a 12-foot rug cheap? No?"

Trying to sell a rolled up rug on the street really came across as desperation. They also tried to sell it to a carpet store also pretty daft. A small general auction house would have valued it on the spot. If they were lucky they may have even got it auctioned or possible been able to sell it to the auction house. Not likely to get the best price that way but it would be better then selling it on the street.

Before I start - I'm in the camp that feels that AS's direction was misleading!

What I can't understand is why the rules were never brought up in the boardroom. We did see a clip where they clearly admitted that Nooral had correctly valued the skeleton. As they later sold it for far less, they clearly didn't understand the rules.

I'm amazed that no-one made any attempt to identify misunderstanding of the rules as the chief cause of failure, and to apportion blame for that error.

Richard

This is really the reason I started this thread.

Unfortunately it has got sidetracked in so many ways but the point was that Sugar said one thing. The teams seemed to be acting as if they were acting on that basis in that there was not once a mention of minimum sale prices.

Not only did the narration not explain the exact terms of the task, for example, whether or not unsold items had to be paid for changes the strategy considerably, but, as you say, there was no mention in the boardroom of any misunderstanding of the rules.

Yeah, the whole confusion for me was if the unsold items counted against them or not. That wasn't ever explained explicitly. Since in previous tasks unsold anything usually does count against them, they assumed it was true for this one too, hence the panic selling.

But the key moment was when Sralan asked Margaret and Nick for the scores. They clearly counted up the value of each item sold and how much it was actually sold for. The final tally did not take any unsold item into consideration.

It it had, all they needed to do was take the total value of the lot and subtract that from their total earnings. But they didn't, they totted up each individual item that was sold. So yes, one team could have sat doing nothing and they would have won. It wasn't clear whether Phil had misunderstood this point or not, but Ben's flog-off at the end showed that he hadn't understood at all.

I was just perplexed why neither team phoned any rug dealers when they were all at the tables with the Yellow Pages. I thought that's what they were supposed to be doing there!