Yeah, that's reasonable.

It was a little more ambiguous than that. I forget the exact wording, but when she was trying to persuade Zoe to buy the larger number of units she said "that's going by how much I sell". Now it's legitimate to interpret that as "I, personally, sell that much", but it's also legitimate to use that phrasing when you mean to say "that's how much my business as a whole sells", or even "that's how many units per person per hour my business sells".

So both Suzie and Zoe could have been right on that one, in that they used/interpreted the same phrase in two different but equally valid ways.

So they did sell the chairs. Okay.


Why not? They're still good-quality furniture. Given that they sold everything else, and that we weren't shown that they had to get rid of anything, is there any reason to suppose that they didn't sell?


Everything else wouldn't have stayed the same because Zoe's team getting the furniture contract would mean Helen's team not getting it. Which means that, as well as Zoe's team getting £200, Helen's team wouldn't have got £300.

Could Helen's team have found another job which netted them £300 in their spare 1 1/2 hours? Maybe. But you can't assume that they necessarily would.


I'm going on the information given on screen. You're making things up out of whole cloth and then using that as the basis of your argument.

In the cosmetics task, regardless of whether Susan said or implied she could sell all the units personally herself, she did say that she knew they would sell, based on her specialist knowledge of the cosmetics market.

Ie she placed her professional judgement on the line.

When she was confronted with her assertion about how much they could sell she tried to wriggle out of it.

What isn't in question is that she was tasked with deciding what stock to purchase and had her advice been acted upon they'd have had even more left over, but at no point did she say that she made a mistake on that.

I admit I don't really warm to her because I don't warm to people who resort to special pleading - in her case about being young. IMO people don't listen to her because she doesn't express herself well.

I do agree with everything you say, here, but I think it's worth noting that the number of units she was trying to get them to buy amounted to each team member selling 2-3 units per hour which, if it's a decent product and they're decent salespeople, doesn't sound unreasonable at all for a stall on the central concourse of a busy mall.

I don't think the failure to sell all the stock can be laid at the door of them having too much stock. I think it's down to the product not being as good as they believed it to be and the sales team not being particularly good at it. Both of which are things that Susan is only partially culpable for.

Problem is if you have been in these malls and have had people you have never seen before trying to flog you overpriced pap, such as Victoria Jackson cosmetics, then you are going to be wary.

Black Country people are not poor (in spite of what patronising Susan thinks) but they are cautious with their money and if something seems to good to be true it probably is. I used to work 15 mins from the Merry Hill Centre for 5 years (didn't even realise Westfield had bought it from the RIchardsons) and used to shop there regularly. Every day there was a new stall trying to flog pap to passers by. Of course you are going to be wary.

I think the difference was they weren't taking away waste in that instance, rather tables and chairs which were still in great condition they could sell on for a lot of money.

It would have been interesting to see what Susan would have said in the boardroom had they lost the task. As it was, the whole business wasn't given that much scrutiny.

All I'd say is that Susan became defensive rather than admitting responsibility when Zoe confronted her during the course of the task, and in the boardroom she attempted to explain the reasoning for her decision (but didn't get to finish) and denied saying something she actually hadn't said.

Just reading through Monkseal's recap on his blog and, to put the non-paying deals in to some kind of perspective, Helen's team had 3 jobs during the day. The pub, Melody's dodgy builder, and the furniture. The furniture took them 1 1/2 hours and netted them £300. Melody's job took them 6 hours and netted them £410 (being extremely generous and taking the dodgy builder at his word that there was £150 worth of scrap in amongst all the rubbish they had to dump). The pub took them 4 hours and netted them the rest of the money - between £380 and £530, depending on how much saleable scrap there was in Melody's job.

Even taking the largest income from each job and ignoring the fact that both the pub and the builder required outlay in the form of dumping rubbish while the furniture was pure profit, the furniture is still far and away the most profitable job in terms of time vs. money. And the pub is the second most profitable, even if we take the pub's lowest figure and the builder's highest, given that the pub had 2 tonnes of waste in total and they ended up carting away 3 tonnes for the builder (and it was £110 to dump a tonne).

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to break down the other teams' profits in this way as we don't have times, or many individual prices for them. But it is worth noting that Tom and Jim raised 80p on the first day just going round and seeing what they could scrounge for free, while Glenn and Leon made £110. And we do know that they made £915 on the copper cylinders they got, most of which were taken from the job that they only got paid £20 for. Which, really, is as close to nothing as makes few odds.