Under Sugar's rules you get something even sillier. The winners win because they do less and don't get a fine for having to trek out to get the last item. As there's no way of estimating time needed to travel in London traffic the logic was don't try unless you have plenty of time. You could argue that there's not much point turning up on time if you don't have the goods. The logic also eventually rewards failing to find 3 items. The girls lose because on Denson's calculation in post 50 they spend more than the list price on the 3 items the boys don't buy and they lose time buying them and incur a time penalty. There's no way of knowing if the boys would have paid more or less for those items or been late if they had found them.

But there's nowhere to look up the list price or the current market price or indeed any price. They only knew what they were told by whoever they phoned or talked to and they had no time to shop around. The task is all random and depends on who they phone and who tells them what, how truthful or accurate it is and who randomly gets to the seller who is desperate enough to cut his price most. There's also an impossible calculation to make of the benefits or not of trying to complete the list.

I think it's a moot point whether it is better to complete only 70% of a project cheaply or to complete it 100% but go a little over budget. Liz concentrated on successful completion with her good planning; Jamie concentrated on budget with his determined haggling. LS was looking for bargaining ability in this task, and so the boys won. However, on a real business project you would want a team that contained both good planners like Liz and good bargainers like Jamie.

I thought the whole things was a fix. As is often the case the 'fines' are arbitrary to ensure the right team loses so whoever LS is gunning for can be fired. I think they wanted to even up the boys versus girls and so ensured the boys team won. Plus Laura had been such a whinebag all the way through it was time she went.

As for a fine of only £50 on top of list item price for items not got - that's seems very low. I'd have expected a fine in the order of magnitude relating to the price. Also neither team seems to adopt what would seem the most sensible strategy to purchase the highest priced items first to minimise fines for ones they didn't get.

"Liz concentrated on successful completion with her good planning; "
then why didnt she plan where to get the truffles from, or did she think it was an everyday item sold by all supermarkets?

Previously this happened earlier I think, but more items were involved?

But - talking about traffic etc is missing the point, the planning exercise should be geographically focused.

Planning phase: research items, try and establish a price, then call suppliers and confirm orders. OK, probably not going to get all of them, but say get 6 or 7 at this stage, even if it takes a couple of hours.

Plan a route that minimises the dealy and ends near to the finishing line.

Continue research while travelling and cross reference between teams to collect as necessary.

Of course that may not in the opinion of the director make for good tv - someone looking at a map cf someone running badly.

Fines, missing items etc. don't matter. It was fair because it was a business task designed to see who could get a good deal and turn a profit.

Imagine in real terms if the girls had been given a list of products to get for re-sale. They paid over the odds. Sometimes it's better to not buy than to throw money away by cutting profit margin.

The boys deserved it.

I agree with what some others have said - this task is totally random, in many aspects, and is invariably one of my least favourite episodes each series because of it.

It perhaps allows the occasional glimmer of sales personality slightly influencing a sale price, but the overall nature of the task is rather odd I find. It's a case of flipping a coin at the beginning to see who will win at the end.

I think both sides, but girls in particular failed to appreciate how the penalty (fines) system worked.

Cost of Failure = The list price +.£50

Cost of Success = The list price +/- negotiation

Looking at it this way you can see more easily why it was a negotiation task, not a treasure hunt.

In NET terms the boys fine was only £150, against the girls £50 for being late.

No, the winners win because they negotiated better than the losers.


Which is a good argument for negotiating well enough to not pay more than £50 above the list price for items. Or, indeed, at all above the list price. That's what the task was about - seeing who could negotiate the best. The answer was the boys.

As Lord Sugar said, it was not a treasure hunt, it was a task about negotiating. The girls failed.

They don't know the list price or any other price - they can't design a strategy around something they have no idea of. Its another unthinking piece of logic dropped into the task by Sugar or whoever designed it - a decision to make the task more difficult, and to produce a few laughs as they struggle to even find out what things are, makes it impossible to complete rationally. They can't even apply common knowledge or sense as the objects are obscure. The task didn't test any useable skills as no one in any respectable business would use such tactics and how well you did depended, in all but one case, on who you ended up randomly dealing with.

Its not even a test of Delboy negotiating skills as even Delboy would almost always know who his suppliers were, who would adopt what bargaining style and what the prices he was looking for were.

The boys win because by chance they turned up on the doorsteps of people they could browbeat and because they didn't even manage to find 3 items. The girls made one mistake on sourcing the truffles and Lord Sugar then kept the person who made the mistake and sent the one who noticed it, and told her about it, home. Ultimately, the task was pointless beyond proving that Chris and Stu are hopeless liars, Jaimie can't reearch as well as anyone else and Stella can't reliably do division and thinks the cheapest truffles live in Knightsbridge..

They could have tried to find out the list prices of items (like Stella managed to do with the truffles). But, even if not, they could still have had a strategy in place. Jamie did. A successful one.


There was nothing random about who they ended up dealing with. They both had phones, and they both had business directories.

And, yes, a big part of being a good negotiator is being able to do it with whoever you encounter. Are you really claiming that being able to negotiate with people you've never met before isn't a usable business skill?


The girls made more than one mistake. But the truffles is a good indication of where the attitudes of the girls' team was wrong. They went after the truffles at any price because they wanted to avoid the fine for avoiding the fine's sake. They had access to all the information about it, which means that a moment's thought would have led them to realise that not buying them and therefore getting a fine of the list price plus £50 would have left them £50 better off than paying £200 for the truffles would have.

Had they been concentrating on the negotiation part of the task, rather than the treasure hunt part, they'd not have made that mistake.

As for sending Laura home, you're right that she noticed that mistake whereas Stella didn't. However, as Suralen said, the reason why both Liz and Stella stayed over Laura was down to their performances in earlier tasks. The candidates are always judged on their over all performances, rather than in just the one task. Both Stella and Liz have done well in previous tasks (although both have made their share of mistakes). Laura has been, at best, useless in previous tasks and was lucky not to get fired in week 2.


So pointless beyond showing how the candidates perform under those conditions?

They simply didn't have time. As was so well demonstrated by Jamie's attempts to find the worktop (which I'm assuming were down to sheer bad luck rather than some particular flash of brilliance on the part of the girl's team).


Yes, he did have a strategy whereas the girls didn't so he did better there. But even then it was just a matter of random good fortune whether his team happened to find suppliers who were amenable to giving good discounts.

Note, in particular, that the only common supplier (IIRC) was for the blue book and there the girls got the better discount and without resorting to bare faced lies.

So, on a like for like comparison the girls did better.


Nonsense.

Unless you believe that they actually phoned up every supplier for every item and somehow got each one to truthfully tell them how much of a discount they would give.


It is a business skill but if Sugar had disallowed the discounts obtained through out and out mendacity as he should have done the boys would have lost massively.


I don't think anyone has ever denied that the girls badly screwed up on the truffle task.

So much so that although their overall performance was better they lost the task.


That isn't really true. They got the 'treasure hunt' part wrong there because they were buying from entirely the wrong supplier. Laura negotiated a 26% reduction from the seller's starting price which is pretty good.


Pointless at showing what they told us the task was supposed to show and pointless at showing how the candidates performed because it was not, generally, possible to compare like for like.

All it would take would be one phone call to a supplier to find the price of something. The girls spent 2 hours on the phones in the morning.


It was clearly stated in the programme that the worktop was an unusually large size and that the reason the girls secured one when the boys didn't is that the girls rang up in the morning and had one specially made.


Finding good suppliers is hardly "random good fortune". And, again, if the merchant doesn't give a good enough discount - go somewhere else. That's what Stella and Laura should have done with the truffles.


They did lie, actually. They said that Rob had said he'd sort them out, when he didn't say any such thing.


Phoning up suppliers isn't random. Deciding how long you're going to spend preparing by phoning up suppliers isn't random. Asking suppliers whether they'll negotiate on price isn't random. Assessing whether they're telling the truth or not isn't random.

How is any of it in any sense random? Did they decide who to visit by throwing a die? When offered a price did they decide whether to take it or not by tossing a coin?


Why "should" he have excluded those deals? He's looking for people who are good in business, not Pinocchio.


I don't think I've implied differently.


Their over al performance was not better. It was worse, which is why they lost the task.


No, they got the treasure hunt part wrong because they decided that buying the item was better than not buying it, even though not buying it would have seen them £50 better off. They considered it more important to get the item and lose £50 than not get the item and gain £50. Or, at least, they were so focused on getting the item to the exclusion of all else that they didn't stop to work out the maths of it.


It's not bad, except where you consider that the boys often got in excess of 50% off. And unless you consider that she knew the list price to be half of that. And unless you consider that she should have known that that was still £50 more than it would cost not to buy it at all.

If you do consider those 3 things then it wasn't that good at all.




It showed us how good they were at negotiating, which is what it was purported to show. And it was possible to compare like for like because both teams started off with exactly the same information and exactly the same resources. The differences came from what they did with that information and those resources, not from completely random happenstance, as you seem to insist.

Nope.

If they pick an expensive supplier that supplier is not going to tell them the typical list price.


So it was just a random thing:

Had anyone had one in stock it would probably have been cheaper and had the boys just happened to pick that supplier they would have got a better deal.


It is if your time is as limited as theirs was. They simply didn't have time to phone around all the suppliers given the timescales of the task. It thus devolved to random good fortune.

For example, several people have said that, even using the net they couldn't find tartan at any where near the price that the boys got it so it was just random good fortune that they happened to find someone that would supply it at a well under half the price that anyone else has found. And that their supplier was amenable to a discount whereas the girl's supplier clearly wasn't.


This, as with several other of your comments, would be true if it was, for example, a two day task. There simply wasn't time. (We heard Jamie threatening but we didn't see a single instance of anyone going to a second supplier.)


You have had access to all the unseen footage?

Otherwise you know this how?


Again, you are assuming a latitude in the timing that simply was not present. All these things are made random because they did not have the time for anything other than superficial research.


Yeah, because of course the supplier will tell them if he's not telling the truth.


You seem incapable of comprehending the realities of the timescales involved.

If you have a telephone book with 50 possible suppliers and only time to phone ten, whether you reach the optimum supplier is just a matter of random chance.


Because in real business people who lie to suppliers and customers don't get far as people won't deal with them again - at least not on good terms.

These people are supposed to be demonstrating their business skills not showing that they would make a successful spiv.


They only performed better according to the cretinously stupid rules of the task which allowed purchases obtained by dishonesty to be counted and awarded an unrealistically small penalty for outright non-performance.


Well, that's not the treasure hunt part, is it?

That was an arithmetic error


Nope.


Yep, you've got it!


Rubbish.

The boys only got 70% of the items and even then the girls got a better discount on at least three items.

The boys won it on an arithmetic error by the girls and striking lucky in getting the tartan for way less than anyone else has found it, even with plenty of time and the net, and a weirdly low price on the sewing machine from someone who didn't even know his own name.


Wat?


Well they got all the items whereas the boys only got 70% and they got a better discount on at least 3 of the items they both got so that seems pretty good to me.


Nope.

It showed us how good Chris was at being dishonest and how Sugar doesn't seem to be concerned with dishonesty.

It purported to show us how good they were at finding and negotiating.

In the end it virtually ignored half of the stated objective and rewarded someone who repeatedly lied to get what they wanted.

So both the design and judgement of the task were woefully inadequate.


Once again you completely ignore the time constraints and thus come up with an absurdly simple analysis that is plainly wrong.

I think you misunderstood what I meant by "supplier" there. I wasn't using it to mean "shopkeeper", but trade supplier. The manufacturer, or their representatives in this country if they're based elsewhere. They will tell you the list price if you say you're from a company looking to trade. They'll tell you the trade price, too. Takes about 2 minutes.


How is it random? It's something that needed to be specially made. The girls phoned up, found this out, and ordered one to be specially made. The boys didn't phone up and find this out and therefore couldn't get one specially made. What on Earth is random about that?


Nobody had one in stock. Nobody stocks them. That's why that size was specified.


The girls seemed to have time to phone round.


Or, to look at it another way, the boys negotiated the deal better than the girls did.


We didn't see anyone go to a second supplier, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't have. Find a couple of suppliers close to each other before you set out and you're in a perfect position to play them off against each other.


Because the girls as good as said as much during the negotiation.


So it's seriously your contention that all the girls did during two hours was to phone up shops and the first time any of them was told that what they were after was in stock they immediately said that that was the one and they were going to go for it? That's slightly over an item an hour per girl.


I think you may have misread or misunderstood the sentence you're replying to.


2 minutes per phone call. 4 people phoning at once. 2 hours. More than 10 phone calls per item.


I think Surallen is probably a better judge of what he's looking for than you are.


Whereas they only performed worse by the strange rules which you believe the task should have been run under.


So we're in agreement - the girls were more focused on getting all the items than they were on ensuring that they got good prices for the items. Which means they had the wrong focus for the task. Good, glad you're on board.


The boys didn't get 50% off?


What can't you understand? The list price was £100 for 50g. Laura knew this. She paid twice that for it. This does not make it a good deal.

Not buying it at all would have cost the team £150. Buying it cost them £200. This means they lost £50 by buying it. This does not make it a good deal.


We were talking specifically about whether Laura and Stella got a good deal on the truffles. You seem to have changed the subject entirely in your reply.


You really are hung up on the fact that they told a couple of tall tales, aren't you? Seriously, the boys won the task because they negotiated better. You seem to think that how well they performed in business terms should be discounted and instead they should have their bottoms smacked for saying the dog ate their homework.

I really don't think that's what this programme is about.


So both teams didn't start off with the same resources?

These long posts all talk about negotiation. This was begging not negotiation. All the traders I believe were losing money on the boys deals. It was the camera really. I have already stated. They should first go in without the camera, and then 'redo' the deal using actors if necessary. If it must be done this way, then the price ought to be, whatever the lowest trade price is however much less they paid for it.
All this still doesnt explain which i consider the biggest fault of all, why the girls never phoned about a high price item like the truffles. I suppose the same as the girls split looking for the ten items they also split phoning for the same items, so Stella and Laura have to be blamed and the PM Liz for not making sure they did this. I was surprised you can buy books (the blue one) under the price.
I also think if they would have begged harder they would have got it even for next to nothing.
The old sewing machine I would have thought is worthless. Who would use that today.

I don't. The boys haggled the truffle seller down to the list price. Jamie got, what, 25% off the tikka? The mark up on jewellery is massive. The average mark up is around 300%, but it can be up to as much as 1000%. The mark up on fabric can be as much as 500%, or sometimes even higher.

I doubt anyone was losing out.

So, what is the trade price for, for example, a tikka? What about a second hand sewing machine? You're taking an absurdly simplistic view of trading. You've obviously got it into your head that this research is a trivial task that you would have completed with ease had either of the teams been graced with your presence. What you don't realise is that it's not quite as straight forward as you think. Not all items have a trade price and many suppliers will not just give out that information to any random caller, often requiring sight of a relevant company letterhead.


Just think for a minute!

Jamie spent hours trying to locate that length and, obviously not one of the people he phoned told him that it was something that would have to be specially ordered. Clearly, through a random chance, the girls happened to fairly quickly get through to someone who volunteered that information. Just random good fortune. Had the first person Jamie called said: "Nah, guv, you won't get one of those off the peg, that's a special order job", his whole day would have gone very differently.

Similarly, had the first jeweler he went to have been of Indian decent they would probably have told him what a tikka was, and, again, his day would have been somewhat different.

Again, with the girls and the truffles, had they spoken to someone who had told them that they were a restaurant who didn't do retail food sales and to try their supplier the overall result would almost certainly have been reversed.

It's all down to random elements.


ROFLMAO.

You only know this because you watched the programme and thus have the knowledge that it's a special size. So you think you're so much cleverer than the teams because you're operating on the back of all their work.


You still don't get it with the random nature of things, do you?

It's obvious that the girls were fortunate enough to have someone tell them pretty quickly that it was a size that would have to be specially ordered. We know from observation that no one told Jamie that.


As long as you are prepared to accept dishonesty, you could say that.


Oh, it's so easy for you, sitting comfortably at home, with no time constraint to airily say what someone operating under extremely tight constraints should do.


'As good as'?

In other words they didn't say anything of the kind and you're just assuming.


Where did you get that from? Theres a big difference between phoning one supplier and phoning every supplier. That's where the random element comes in yet again. If you're lucky enough to pick the one supplier who's the cheapest you've got a head start. Just another random factor.


Correct. I read 'assessing' as 'asking'. Nonetheless you're almost certainly wrong. Expecting anyone to make an accurate assessment of the honesty of someone they don't know, can't see and have only spoken to for a few seconds is a bit of a stretch.


Obviously. And if he's looking for a barrow boy or a spiv, fair enough, allow the contestants to behave like barrow boys and spivs.

But that's not what the programme is advertised as being about. It's advertised as a search for a serious business person.


Under the particularly stupid way it was set up, yes, but, again, it was effectively random because they had no way of knowing what they needed to know to make that call.

With perfect hindsight, of course, you do.


No.

Unless you can tell us which item they got the supplier to drop 50% from his starting price.


Why you continue too harp on about bad negotiating when the actual problems the were wrong supplier and an arithmetic error which no one is denying.


You are still muddling up the wrong supplier/arithmetic thing with the negotiating.


It was a bit more than a 'couple of tales'. Chris's whole negotiating style was based on outright, bare faced, lies.

It's clear that some people don't consider honesty and integrity important and others do.

I do and you obviously don't so there's little point in discussing the matter.


Seriously, the boys won the task because they told lie after lie after lie.

You're quite comfortable with that.


Repeatedly lying to those with whom you are dealing is not performing well in business terms.

Unfortunately Sugar seems to have adopted the position that as it was a one off task with no possible repercussions and they got away with it that makes it OK.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only person to think a little less of him because of this.


The programme is purported to be about the search for a serious, high flying, business person. No one who carelessly who told the sort of lies Chris did would last very long at all at that level in the real world.


You still don't get the difference between having the same resources and the random nature of important factors.

Let me try an make it easy for you with a simple example.

You give two people a bag each and in each bag are 99 red balls and one black ball. The red balls contain nothing but the black ball contains a question and if the person answers that question they win £100. They each get one pick.

Now, can you see that although they both start off with exactly the same resources the result is all but random?

The constraints on time and information sources together with the incomplete information about the items themselves turn the task into something that was absurdly influenced by random chances.

The boys win partly because they were better at finding suitable vendors, and the girls were bad at it. Getting truffles from the most expensive resturant was just one example. Here are the initial prices:

Blue Book: girls £75, boys £70
Tikka: girls £195, boys £180
Sewing Machine: girls £69, boys £59
Tartan: girls £70, boys £47,
Plates: girls £132, boys £165.60
Truffles: girls £270, boys £150

So in 5 out of the 6 cases, the girls were starting from a higher asking price. If there had been no negotiating at all by either team, they'd have been £140 behind. That's not luck, that's the boys being consistently better at finding cheaper vendors.

I don't agree about the boys being better off for failing to find the chicken feet, worktop and hemp rope. In general, we don't know what their list prices were. The girls seemed to get a good price on the worktop.

My mum kept her mums old hand cranked Singer machine as it was very good for stitching leather - something the electric ones couldn't do.
Not sure if the one they had to source was hand turned though...

I think if the girls went to the boys vendors they also would have been charged more. Thats the nature of things girls get charged more. I think the reason is because if they want something they wont go away without buying whatever the price.

Actually, it's the only example where we know they fouled up.

The problem we have analysing this task is not knowing how many potential suppliers there were for each item and how many phone calls they could make per hour (It's easy to say "a two minute phone call" but all sorts of things can slow down a series of such calls).

Two stand out cases of random good fortune:

The girls were lucky to find out immediately what the 'blue book' actually was.

The boys were lucky to happen upon a supplier for the tartan that would sell it to them at a price so low that no one has been able to come anywhere near even with all the resources of the web.

People keep insisting on using hindsight to inform their analyses: e.g. Oh, the boys got the tartan for £47 therefore the girls screwed up.

But we only know that the tartan was available for that price because we saw it bought for that. There are probably dozens upon dozens of places to buy that material and if the girls happened to phone 10 of the most expensive it only needed the boys to luckily find one supplier who was substantially cheaper for them to win on that item.

That doesn't mean that they were actually better at finding a cheap price, they just got lucky.

Similarly with the work top. It was quite clear that not one of the people Jamie was phoning told him that is was something that you would have to have specially made. Conversely (unless whoever was researching that actually thought to ask) the girls apparently got that information pretty quickly. (Of course, we never heard Jamie ask the obvious question: "Do you know where I could get one" which might have elicited the all important info.)

But in essence, it was just down to random chance whether either team happened upon a cheap supplier - or, indeed, one who was prepared to bargain.

There is a notion here that if you go to a trader and offer him trade price he will accept. If it is a regular article not something he wants to get rid of, he has the trouble of buying it again and being out of stock if a genuine customer comes, Even for a small profit its just not worth his while.
The gold jewellery depends on the price of gold, and if it is real gold, which everyone knows the price of, the mark up cannot be that high. I think this 'tikka' is only made from gold, so depending on weight, one could easily find the price.

Actually, we see him being told exactly that in a phone call, at around 22 minutes in on iPlayer. I suspect he figured it out for himself earlier; we see several people telling him they only stocked 3m.


Why? Isn't it more likely that when the first vendor or second told them it wasn't in stock, they asked him a few questions? It would have been the obvious thing to do. Nobody needed to wait for the vendor to volunteer. Whenever a shop tells me they don't have what I want to buy, I ask them to suggest who would. Sometimes they won't or can't tell me, but usually they don't mind as they aren't losing a sale. It's not rocket science to ask.

I expect Jamie did ask. He said he'd exhausted the phone book, so presumably he actually phoned the same vendor Liz's team used. His problem was that by the time he got onto the item, it was too late to order it, so he needed to find someone who had it in stock. He was trying to solve a harder problem.

Basically, what happened here is that the production team cunningly threw in an item that had a lead time. The girls were better organised; they used the office time at the start to research all the items, figure out what they all were, and identified the ones which would be hard to source. In this way, they spotted and avoided the trap set by the production team with the worktop.

The boys had a different strategy; they chose to hit the road earlier. They planned less. They were slower to identify the items so consistently that I don't think it was chance.

It's interesting to compare Liz's team with teams from previous series on the same task. It seems to me they were the first to really use those initial 2 hours as they are supposed to be used. OK, they failed to establish list prices, but that's something I've never seen any team do.


To me it was pretty obvious that a posh resturant is the most expensive place to buy food. It was obvious to Laura, too; we see her telling Stella that she is wasting time trying to phone Gordon Ramsey and that they should more to East London instead.