True. My point is that they had higher starting prices so consistently that it is statistically likely they were doing something wrong.


Again, the girls are so much better at identifying the items that I argue it goes beyond luck. It's what they spent the first 2 hours doing, in the office. The boys chose to hit the road early instead. I think the girls had watch enough previous series to know there is usually an item like "Nigella seeds" that will mess you up unless you are careful. So they did the research first. I can't prove it, but we see them taking the time and the statistics are suggestive.


You might be right. Or you might not. Do you at least see it could have been skill? That they might have got cheaper starting prices because they went looking in a cheaper area of town?

Again, because the boys found good prices consistently, I think it more likely that they were doing something differently.

Well, we're talking about seven items and I'm not at all sure that they always had higher starting prices. Whatever, it's an extremely small sample size and, without knowing the number off possible suppliers and the number of research calls that could be made in the time available it's impossible to even attempt the proper probability calculations.


Certainly the girls were better organised (and certainly Jamie was better at negotiating [without lying]). But even so there is a large element of luck in happening to pick a supplier who a) offers a low starting price and or b) will discount.


Obviously. But the fact that something could be down to either skill or random chance means that it ends up as being random.

The skilled team could be unlucky and the unskilled team lucky.


Did they?

Of the seven items they both bought the girls got three for a lower price. That's as near even as makes no odds with this small a sample size.


Yes. They were running round like headless chickens.

Headless chickens that got lucky because:

1) They found an extraordinarily cheap supplier for the tartan.
2) The found someone who would give a weirdly high discount on the sewing machine.
3) The girl's team screwed up badly on the truffles.

The girls paid £69 for the tartan.


It's not clear how much they paid for the worktop. £270 is shown on the register as the list price. Beneath that we see £166.83 listed several times, so they might have paid that. We also see Joanna counting, and she seems to count up to £135.


Where does that come from? If they paid £135 and list price is £270, they got a 50% discount.

You disagree with the figures I gave in #70?


I'm still talking about them finding a vendor with a lower asking price.

As far as I can tell, the girls paid less for 2 items, not 3. One was the plates, which is the one case they had a better starting price. The other was for the Blue Book, where Liz and Joanna were negotiating and got a better deal than Chris and Stuart. (In general Liz and Joanna do a better job, but not good enough to make up for Stella and Laura.) They both bought the memory, but we don't know how much the girls paid. The boys got a 50% discount and I doubt the girls did better.


They found a supplier wanting £47, and then they negotiated a 50% discount. That's good; it's what the task is about.

The girls found one who wanted £70 and would only discount down to £69. The girls should have found someone with a cheaper asking price and a better discount. If the chap they were with couldn't give a good deal, they should have walked away. They should have researched what a good deal was, but even without prior knowledge, a £1 discount is clearly merely token.


A similar story: higher asking price, smaller discount for the girls. Jamie got a better price partly because he worked harder for it. He didn't just give up.

It does seem like you are unwilling to allow the boys any credit.


Well, true. There's always an element of benefiting from the opposing team's mistakes. That Laura and Stella could take their eye off the ball like that was a big part of why they lost.

Jamie also got a better price on the Tikka. Basically, Stuart and Chris did what the task said they should: they took their list of 5 items, found cheap suppliers, negotiated good discounts and got back on time. They did such a good job they carried the team. Jamie screwed up by failing to get 3 of his 5 items, but he did a good job on the two items he did get. Enough to win overall.

The figures in #70 show that the boys didn't always get the lowest starting price.


Your figures are different from the ones previously entered on this thread. The girls appear to have done better on 'other'.

Whatever, the sample size is way too small to say anything reliable about their relative performances. If you don't trust me, ask anyone you know who understands probability/stats.


The task is about two things.

Finding all the items - here the boys failed.
Getting a good price - here the boys won but largely through dishonesty.

It's only because of the screwball way the task was scored and Sugar's acceptance of dishonest behaviour that the boys won.


I'm not allowing Chris and the bagginator any credit because they got their prices by dishonesty and lying and their results shouldn't have been allowed. (They do get credit for finding their 5 items, of course).

I've agreed in this thread and at least one other that Jamie was the best at haggling.


They got their results by dishonesty.

There's no way that, on this forum, those who believe honesty is a fundamentally important attribute of serious business people are ever going to agree with those to whom it is a luxury that can be disregarded when it is expedient to do so.

"Many" suppliers? I've never, ever had a problem when I've done it. It's been a 2 minute phone call. It's absurdly easy.


Yes they did. We saw more than one person


Or, had he known it was an Indian piece of jewellery (not hard to work out, given that it's made of gold and has an Indian name) he could have phoned an Indian jeweller before he set foot in a car.


They did know they were in a restaurant that didn't do retail food sales. And Laura had already said that they should be looking for a supplier in the East End rather than a restaurant in Knightsbridge.

Nothing random about it, I'm afraid.


I'm struggling to see how you inferred that I think I'm cleverer than the teams from what I posted. I was saying that finding out that it was a special size that needed to be specially made was something that was within the teams' capability to find out, rather than something "random".

The girls phoned people up in the morning. The people they phoned said it would have to be specially made as nobody stocks them in that size and that they could have it ready by the afternoon. The girls said yes, and got the top.

Jamie phoned people up in the afternoon. The people he phoned said it would have to be specially made as nobody stocks them in that size. Jamie phoned too late to have it made and didn't get the top.

This, according to you, is something completely random that neither team had any control over whatsoever. Which, frankly, is a bizarre way to interpret the facts.


Well, I don't know what you were watching, but I know from observation that two separate people told Jamie that.


Not only could I, but I'll think you find I did.


I'm not saying that I would be perfect under those circumstances, nor am I saying that the teams aren't under great pressures. However, you're saying that the entire task was random and that the teams had no way at all to have any control over what happened. I'm pointing out that what you're declaring to be impossible is, in fact, possible.


They said that Rob had said the seller would look after them. The seller said "Rob said that, did he?", and they replied "oh, well, you will look after us, won't you?" It's not really very ambiguous.


And yet that's exactly what happens in phone negotiations all the time. Seems like a worthwhile skill to test, no?


And "serious business people" never lie? All "serious business people" are scrupulously honest in all dealings?


What else did they need to know? They knew the list price for 50g of truffles was £100. They knew the fine for not buying an item was the list price + £50. They knew that 50 + 100 = 150. They knew they were being asked £200 for 50g of truffles. Tell me what other information they needed in order to figure out that they would have been better off not buying the truffles at that price.


The tartan was £47. They got it for £23. The USB stick was £22. They got it for £10. The sewing machine was nearly 50%, too, as they were asked for £59 and ended up paying £35. That's 59%, which is still quite a considerable discount.


It is not good negotiation to negotiate a deal that you'd be better off not taking than taking - and then taking that deal.


I don't give a toss. I'm not employing any of them.

It does amuse me how apoplectic you seem that someone in business might not have been being completely honest, though. Especially when what we're talking about is stuff of the calibre of "10? Are you trying to insult me? Me with a poor, dying grandmother? 10?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n3LL338aGA). It's like you've never encountered haggling before.


You seem to be the only one on this board.


Yes, but the problem with that example is that it's bollocks which has nothing to do with the episode.

Incidentally, what happens if you pick the question but then answer it with a lie?

Actually, it is. Average retail mark-up on jewellery, even if it's just gold, is 300%. 1000% is not unusual. And you can find the price of all the things that jewellery contains easily, not just the gold.

Did we ever find out what the mystery tenth item was??

From a previous post. It seems to have been hemp rope

On the worktop, when the girls buy it the cash register gives the list price as £270. I don't know if that's the same as the list price Lord Sugar used, but it's indicative. It suggests that the worktop was not just the hardest item to buy (because it had to be ordered in advance), but also the most expensive. The other items he failed to find were the hemp rope and chicken feet. We don't know how much the girls paid for those, but they don't sound expensive. The boys were fined £511.50, so the total of the 3 items he missed was £361.50, so if the worktop was £270 the other two must be £91.50.

If you were to make a pitch to a potentially lucrative client for a massive contract I think you would find that the traffic conditions would be critical to you winning the contact. If you were to turn up late you might as well go straight to the pub.

As someone else said, the £50 fine for being late was ridiculous. Especially as Lord Sugar made out that it was very important. They probably change the figures to make the program more interesting anyway.

That is the point Lord Sugar made perfectly clear.

It was not about buying things.

It was about buying things at the right price.

I don't know what series we are on and I am certainly not a businessman or entrepreneur. However, I know that what is important is profit.

Lord Sugar is always ranting on about keeping your costs under control.

As he often says, anyone can sell a fiver for £10.

With that level of business acumen I'm amazed he ever sold anything.

Quite.

This is known as adapting the priorities for the activity in question.

If you are handing in a bid or tender for a contract where there is a fixed, immutable, deadline, then obviously your absolute priority is to get there on time.

If, OTOH, you boss sends you of to buy ten ten items and says: "Get back by 6:00", I'll guarantee that 99% of bosses would by seriously annoyed if you came back with seven and your excuse was that you thought you might be five minutes late if you tried to get the rest.

Right. Which is what the deadline in this task was testing. They knew the penalties for not getting an object, and they knew the penalties for being late. It was up to them to decide which they thought was more important.

ROFLMAO.

You really, really, do have a problem understanding the whole 'random' effect, don't you.

We all know that they knew the penalties.

The point that you seem to be almost willfully failing to understand is not a difficult one.

Where both teams chose to cut things fine (as they did in this task as witnessed by the boy's delight in actually getting back on time) then, if things were close (as, again, they were in this task), including the journey back turned the task into one where the outcome was entirely random and decided by the detailed particulars of the rush hour traffic at the exact time the journeys were made.

In this instance where the traffic was such that the boys made it and the girls didn't, the boys won.

Had it been another day and things had been reversed - the boys got a couple of extra red lights and the girls got a couple fewer, then the result of the entire task would have been reversed.

Which makes the that element of the tasks design utterly brainless particularly as they could have eliminated the randomising factor by simply stopping the task at a certain time and not counting anything bought afterwards.

I really don't understand why you are having so much difficulty with such a simple concept.

You all seem to think that the traffic problem only occurred at the end of the day and want to cut it out. Then why is the rest of the day different. There is traffic problems the whole day. If you want to cut it out then you have to cut it out the whole day and only count the time they are in shops buying. Which would take out the random traffic problems altogether.

True.

I think they think that having them run from place to place makes good TV (personally, I find it looks ridiculously staged most of the time).

But there are many impracticalities in removing all the intermediate movement whereas the final journey would be very easy to discount.

I think you make way too much of it and have demonstrably attributed things that were entirely down to the decision making by the teams as being "random".


Although, from the programme, it looked like the boys didn't cut it as fine as the girls. We heard the girls saying that they literally had a couple of minutes in the shop buying the plates, and they clearly spent quite a bit longer in there. The boys didn't demonstrate anything like that. Equally, we saw the boys urging the driver to drive more aggressively, whereas we didn't see anything like that from the girls.


No it wouldn't. In the final analysis, the fine didn't matter at all.


But that doesn't test the risk assessment skills of the candidates. It's a different thing.

But we still don't know whether thats random - 3 of the gaps are small, the Tartan pricing is mysterious and the girls get a better offer price on the plates. There's no evidence that the boys are doing anything the girls didn't on the research front and the general impression was that they wasted a lot of time aimlessly wandering. The sub teams seem to have one phone and we have no figure how many suppiers they could finally find for every item. We know some things they could only find one supplier for. We know they got lots of dead ends and were put on hold a lot , and we know that for 3 things Jaimie found no one. We also know that no one had much idea on most items what a reasonable price was . Its also difficult to see how in a phone call they could know who was likely to go lower or who was in fact demanding a high price.

It just doesn't look possible to me to buy other than at random - to do it properly they needed to go further and have multiple negotiations and offers and to pick the cheapest they could get to. They also needed to do all that limited by having only two cars and having to route their day so they could get back by Lord Sugar's going home time. Even if you assume they could have made better calls and targetted cheaper sources (like a food supplier rather than a resturant) its far from clear how they were meant to find these - if they couldn't for example find any supplier for Truffle in the phone book, it wasn't going to be possible to phone enough "food" suppliers in the phone book to find several who happened to have truffles. In most cases, it all depends on who you find and what people you run into tell you. The boys got bad luck with the Blue Book being told the wrong thing- but may have just had good luck finding cheaper suppliers therafter .

Even if the boys are getting lower offers, its probably complicated why. If its not entirely random, did the boys get lower offers for being males - is the task actually just testing a presumption among most of those sellers that boys are tougher buyers which makes the girls task harder? Or is it luck that the boys happen to find more desperate sellers who are selling at lower prices and these are the sellers who can be badgered to go even lower?. If it isn't luck , and its difficult to see how anyone could do better just using the phone book, did the boys use any criteria to spot cheap suppliers - perhaps by locality? The scenes of them wandering around the West End or going on suggestions, didn't suggest any such strategy? If the boys happen on the cheap looking suppliers, what does that tells us beyond that that they had luck ? Even if the cheaper buys do come from spending time picking suppliers, how do you assess that when the time taken contributes to not getting three items at all and the methodology fails to even find those items?

I don't think that's a safe assumption. In fact, I'd have thought it quite a safe assumption that he didn't try to find some vendors. We do know he wasted a good 2 or 3 hours trying to find the kitchen counter. One of the things he was supposed to find and buy was chicken feet.- available from any butcher, anywhere. I find it hard to believe that he couldn't find them. It seems far more likely to me that he was too busy looking for the worktop to try. If the tenth item was hemp rope, then that is also both fairly common and fairly inexpensive.

This task to me doesnt seem to be about looking for cheap suppliers.
The task is about 'begging' not negotiating. So it doesnt make a difference who the supplier is.
Its about getting the camera in, and using your begging talents. Which the boys understood very well.

The girls had the cost of the meal they promised they'd have at the restaurant (they bought the truffles from) included as well did they not?

I'm afraid that I have demonstrated no such thing. The problem is you don't seem to understand how random factors combine with non-random factors to yield a random outcome.

I tried to make it easy for you by providing an analogy but you then demonstrated that you don't understand analogies by stating that it 'didn't have anything to do with the task'. Well, obviously. The whole point of an analogy is to remove the explanation from the topic under discussion to make it easier to understand.

You also have a problem in that you think that just because you can come up with a scenario where something works one way it will always work that way. It won't.

To prove that finding the supplier with the lowest price is not random you need to prove three things:

1) That you know how many suppliers there are in total. <s>
2) That you know how many calls the teams could make. <c>
3) What number of the total suppliers would offer the cheapest price. <l>

Only when c > (s-l) does whether or not a team could be guaranteed to call the supplier with the lowest price become non random,

And that's before you even consider the question of finding the supplier whose combination of starting price and amenability to discounting could potentially offer the lowest price.


There you go again.

You are making a supposition that might support your argument in one specific case and then acting as if that proves said argument for all cases.


That is simply wrong. More specifically, it is only considering half the equation.

Work it out for yourself: What would have been the result if the boys had been held up in a jam and been late and the girls had had better fortune and arrived back on time?


The candidates risk assessment skills can be adequately tested by the decision they make earlier in the process.

We know that both teams assessed the risk of getting the last item they did to be worthwhile even though, as demonstrated, both teams were very anxious that they'd left it too late. The result was random, based on the particular traffic that day.

It's a perfectly safe assumption.

Just because you don't look for something does not mean that you've found it.

I don't think they did, no. They certainly shouldn't have done. They only promised to go back and have a meal, they didn't actually have to go and do it. Charging for a meal they said they might have at some point in the future would only make sense if they also charged Chris for the train fare to go to the wedding with his Scottish granny.


Ah, semantic squabbling. The true hallmark of all good reasoned debate.

You know, when I started debating with you I thought it might be interesting or fruitful. But it's just got to the stage where it seems like arguing for the point of it. You've adopted the position of someone who is trying to explain to someone who is intellectually inferior why they're so stupid, and that never leads anywhere productive. So, you win. You've beaten me into submission. Well debated.