But they could reinvest after 5pm or at 5am the next day.
Not point doing it during trading when they are selling so well.

Lord Alan was wanting them to restock at a wholesalers 2-3 times per day. No trading business does that.

And if they had any intention of trading for more than two days, they would have reinvested that night or the next morning. As it happens, though, the cutoff point of 6PM would pretty much coincide with the end of trading, so they would have had to lose out on selling time to get more stock.

No one else mentioned it until you brought it up quite recently. I didn't hear him say that and I was concentrating with no distractions so it can hardly have been very clear. Having one person mention it en-passant is not an acceptable way to get across something that is so fundamental to understanding the task.

It would also be a very odd rule since it would force people to act against what was best for their bottom line.

Let's face it, the task design was a screw up. If reinvestment was so important they should have been given a much smaller initial palate so that reinvestment and the strategy for deploying the team members became an absolutely vital part of the task.

As it was we had Melody and Helen both going together to restock thus losing valuable selling time which is something he could have legitimately griped about but didn't seem to notice.

But Sugar does not usually rate the tasks on that basis.

Remember the inedible function food a couple of series back?

Of lying to suppliers last series.

Normally he doesn't care about the future of these 'pretend' businesses. Had it been of importance then he should have made it a part of the rules to maintain a certain stock level.

exactly this

I think this task was designed to replicate how Lord Alan started off in business. He apparently had £100 to begin with, which he used in part to buy a van so must have been virtually nothing towards stock, hence constant reinvestment in the correct items was vital.

Giving them £1000 rrp of goods made it too easy.

I think it's partly the time constraint.

What the task designer didn't think through was that it takes a fair bit of time to move around London during the day and with limited selling time no one is going to want to be doing that too often.

Maybe it would have been better if they had arranged things so that the teams could check out a range of available stock and then order it and get it delivered as they needed it.

It doesn't make any difference whether their assets are in stock or money at the end of day two. They are not being counted on what the stock might make on day three.Even if day three mattered it doesn't matter whether you restock at the start of day three or the end of day two.

Its true that if you run out of stock on day two you can't maximise your sales. But there was no evidence that anyone was running out of stock, or that they could have sold more in the time with more stock,.

The trade off is that if you restock again on day two (if people are open still and you can) that takes task time that you could have been selling more, at a markup. You transform cash into day three stock - which does you no good at all , but you make less profit and sell less. f

Essentially, on what we saw , Natasha got it absolutely right. It could have gone wrong and they could have had nothing to sell - but they didn't.

Lord Sugar just heard the words didn't reinvest, jumped to a conclusion, and got it entirely wrong, again.

He was actually having a bad day too. If Helen had completed her trade deal they would have won with the fine in place, If she had found another shop nearby for the same deal they would have won anyway . At worst , as someone else posted, the return on the deal was at least as good as anyone elses return doing what Lord Sugar thought they should.

Thats right I think.

Its a good task for 4-5 days.

Give them £250 and see who can get how much stock and goods by day five. There's not enough cycles to show much in two days apart from producing another marginal win or a competition for who made the biggest mistake. .

The limitation though is that they need suppliers who are actually open and supplying and not seemingly tailored for people who turn up one day a week and place a big order. The lesson may be that the world isn't as suitable for anyone to do a Sugar anymore?

It also shows the problem sacking some people before tasks they might do well in. Zoe might well have done better with this task if Melody had gone last week rather than this - its all looking very random.

This year is different though. He wants a business partner, one who can grow the business without his constant involvement, not just an apprentice/employee.

The scoring did match the stated aim.


That's not how the task was designed. They could have made more money by reinvesting. Look at it this way: if you reinvest in your most profitable lines, and sell some more, you make more money. If you reinvest and don't sell more, then you've not lost anything, because the value you paid for the good you still hold count to your credit. The only thing you can lose is time, and you should be able to gain more being able to sell your most profitable lines then you lose by not selling less profitable ones. Especially if you organise your teams well.

Natasha's team didn't win from being canny. They won because they other team cocked it up even worse.

It's partly because it was the first task like this, and the candidates just didn't get it. I reckon in future years the task will be repeated, and the candidates will bring in vastly greater profits, once they understand how to best exploit the rules. You don't have to sell everything on that initial pallet. You should probably be ignoring 90% of it.


They were told explicitly at the start that they needed to be reinvesting two or three times a day. They broke the rule. Rule breaks are often punished by fines.

There are generally written rules we don't get to see, and the fines were probably spelled out in there. We can't assume Lord Sugar changed the rules without more evidence.


You would complain if someone criticised a candidate for something that could be explained by the editing, so I'm surprised you aren't as generous to Lord Sugar.

There's no point in reinvesting if you can't sell more, it just wastes time. There's no evidence that they could have sold more than they did in the time.

You can argue they ought to have put more resources into selling whats selling well at the best margin and kept on going back to that and concentrating on it. That would work if you could go through several cycles of reinvestment quickly. Its not clear from the show though that there was a stand out item, or supplies of it, or opportunities to sell more of it that was missed. Its possible that Natasha may have made more by buying more of what Susan and Jim were selling, and selling more herself , but she's selling from the same pitch as Susan and they won't sell more if she stays there or moves to where Jim is. We have no idea if she had another pitch available. There's no evidence anyone ran out of stock. There's no evidence that there's something else she should have spent more on - or that they would have made up the sales lost while they were away buying stock.

It looks like a case of Lord Sugar thinking something ought to happen and getting the wrong end of the stick thinking it hadn't . It looks like he heard the figure of £20 for reinvestment, assumed that was all they had done, and jumped to the conclusion that it was a mistake and they would have made more without it.

The re-investing 2/3 times a day bit, wasn't part of the task. It was just part of the preamble that LS gave about what he used to do. The point was to establish items that sold well, and continue selling them. If you are about to run out of a good selling item, you buy more to sell on.

A lot of the items that they were given at the start went unsold and therefore the total value of the initial products has less relevance.

I thought it was pretty clear that nodding dogs and umbrellas were stand-out items. Jim was desperate to buy more. In the end he did, but he was too late to actually sell them. Had he gone earlier, as he wanted to, he'd have made more money than he did.


It's not about running out of stock. That palette was huge. It's about running out of the best-selling items. You are basically repeating the same mistake of thinking that as long as they had stock to sell, they were OK.

It was supposed to be iterative. They were supposed to learn, and fine-tune their products, each time they reinvested. With only one reinvestment, they couldn't do that.


I very much doubt it. Nick and Karren aren't deaf and blind. He knew how much they'd reinvested from the figures read out in the boardroom.

The £20 was specifically by Jim on umbrellas. Why £20 not £100? He'd already incurred the opportunity costs of travelling to the wholesaler and back, so why do all that for £20? It's as if he thought he'd be better off with the value in cash than with the value in goods. That was wrong, a fundamental mistake, and a failure to understand the task. No wonder Lord Sugar was annoyed. It was Jim who had the wrong end of stick, not Lord Sugar.

I believe it was Natasha who decreed how much money was allowed to be reinvested (by Jim - in exchange for the umbrellas). She made several comments about having taken (what she perceived to be) a risk the first day and wanting to be more cautious on the second. Of course, seemingly, if she wanted to get praise from Sugar this was the wrong decision.

Nevertheless, her team still won the task. I therefore agree with Jepson and others that this task - in particular it's scoring - was not thought-out properly by Sugar/whoever it is who makes up these challenges, since Sugar obviously wanted the candidates to follow his reinvestment mantras.

Lord sugar stated smell what sells ,thats the point ,1st day find out what sells then keep reinvesting the monies in more of the same stock...
Profitable lines represent an investment in your business so to grow you need to keep reinvesting...

My thoughts as well.

I meant there's no evidence that they run out of the best selling items. Its not clear that there was only one clear leading item that they should have concentrated their resources on. Nor that they persisted with anything that sold that much less well? They needed a mix and their range looked right - wheras Melody's sheets looked wrong for their non retail traders?

Could Jim have sold more umbrellas than he did if he had more ? Would that offset the sales lost while he was away? We don't see that answered. There's no advantage in task terms of ending the day with £100 worth of umbrellas or just keeping the cash.

I agree the £20 sounds bad if Sugar assumes thats the tiny scale they were investing in. In Jim's terms, there's not much possibility he can sell the £20 worth . In Natasha's view, its a marginal decision whether more reinvesting will mean more or less sales and a higher or lower final team total.. The only way that Lord Sugar's argument makes sense is if you assume you should maximise your stock in case a big order wanders up at the last minute - but, in the game context, should you lose time and sales just in case a miracle last minute buyer turns up?

"Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput."

Alan Sugar, 2005

If he had a go at me for bad judgement I'd soon remind him of that little prediction he got wrong 174 million times.

OK. Regardless of who's mistake it was, it was a mistake.


Because the other team made similar mistakes and in addition, Helen and Melody devoted their efforts to selling to retail, and Helen wasted half the day on a single sale that didn't materialise. Melody didn't seem to achieve anything.

Natasha had Jim, who was selling at the top of his game, Susan seemed to sell well the second day too. Melody's best sales person seemed to be Tom? As a straight sales task, it's unsurprising that Natasha's team won.

LS grouped his favs in anticipation that they would outsmart the 'weaker' team. They failed miserably and he was angered by that. When he heard Natasha spent twenty odd quid on restock, he went berserk and retaliated unfairly. Natasha played a blinder and it paid off against the erroneous judgements of the other team. Helen's lucky streak had run out. LS was forced to fire one of his favs.

They started off with a pallet of goods with an rrp. The cost to LS was 200 odd pounds. I cannot understand 100% how this task was calculated. I doubt if the candidates did either. This was a selling task with the emphasis on restocking goods that sell. I get that bit. What I don't get is if the task is scored on value of cash and assets, then surely if you bought a nodding dog for 3.50 then this would be the figure used in the sums too if it went unsold. So where is the incentive to restock? If they use the rrp for unsold stock then any team selling just 1 nodding dog would win without restocking anything. Why? well LS said that the stock had an rrp of a couple of grand. Do the sums and you would be over 2000 pounds and would win the task! If they went on the selling price that too is arbitrary, so selling everything expensive would be to their advantage. The whole damn thing is flawed. Never, never, never should he have fined the team and taken away their treat.

We'd all know exactly how well each individual member of the winning team had done ... if only we had access to Natasha's book.

If I was on The Apprentice I would be exploiting the rules all the time because every task is flawed. Just look at the biscuit task with Jim's promise of Harry Potter endorsement winning them the task.

Lots of talk about "rules" in this thread. This isn't the Olympics, this is an entertainment programme, and as LAS is going to be putting his time and money into the winners business, it is entirely up to him how he plays it - just like double firing weeks and having 4 finalists instead of two, etc, etc. Do you not also appreciate that things like "fines" and cancelling the treat make good telly, and keep everyone on their toes - otherwise becomes very formulaic. Sit back, deep breaths and enjoy the show for what it is...

Have you considered the pressure of limited time is there for a reason. Give the teams the luxury of time, does not test them in a high pressure situation. Also, have you heard of the Kobyashi Maru?