Exactly what I was going to say. The idea of the task was interesting: "smell what sells". Then prioritise that and maximise profits. But 2 days is not enough time to offer a selection of goods, notice a trend and then re-stock with that in mind.

What did he think they would do, run back to the stock place 3 times in one day? That is physically impossible given the time and personnel limitations.

The team that won was the team that should have won since they analysed how to maximise the money given the limitations of the task. LS went off at them because his romantic notion of what the task should have been about was not accurately reflected in the reality of the situation. The fine was unfair, that team made a sensible decision not to re-stock so much as that would eat into the greater return on the sales. They were proved right by winning.

This task was very confused and a bit poor. But at least the right person got fired! An empty vessel, that one.

Both teams spent the whole first day selling then re-stocked late in the evening. Two days was plenty of time if they had started thinking about re-stocking earlier in the first day. The task was fine as it was set up. If one team had re-stocked as Sugar advised they'd have made far more money. They split in to two selling teams and then had no way to re-stock as they went. They should have had a two person selling team leaving one to go and buy stock or sell as required. They could have chosen to sell near the wholesalers, but they chose to sell in more central locations and incur the time lost in travelling.

I thought this was an intriguing task. It was rather different to the usual selling tasks and needed a different approach. Neither team got it despite Sugar clearly pointing out the correct strategy to adopt at the outset. Make profit, buy more stock, make much more profit. Volume sales of best selling items.

How do they make more money with more or better stock? They can only do it if they find and concentrate their effort on fewer goods that sell better and make more. But every other variable remains the same so how do the same number of people seling in the same place to the same customers generate more sales when there's no evidence they ran out of anything anyway?

On location, they seemed to have some market stalls available which seems to suggest they had pitches given to them. Its not clear that they could set up where they liked, whether they needed stalls or a licence , or that the wholesalers could have been nearer to them.

I didn't really get this bit.
Natasha's team did reinvest. What's more they won the task based on picking some good reinvestments - a mix of picking the previous days best sellers and Susan using her own outside experience to pick up the high profit margin bracelets
.
Natasha was clearly useless and didn't deserve a win personally. - but she got a win off the back of strong performances by Susan and Jim. Denying the whole team their treat doesn't make sense.

The task may have been fine the way it was set up if Sugar had not thrown a tantrum because the rules and scoring system did not induce the candidates to do what he wanted them to do.

He should have realised that that was his failure, learned from it, and moved on; not thrown his toys out of the pram and changed the rules like a spoilt child.

He didn't make a mistake. The candidates knew what to do, but they were wrapped up in selling, rather than gearing up profits. If they had actually done what he asked they would make much more profit over the two days. If you can't see that it's not Lord Sugar's problem.

He didn't throw a tantrum (and create a fine out of thin air). Fines for breaking task rules are there in every task, they just don't get mentioned every time to the viewers. Very early on one of the candidates said something about not wanting to get a fine. I forget the context, but fines were clearly possible.

Tom ran out of nodding dogs a couple of hours into the first day. He was better at selling those than all the other tat.

Both teams had members who wasted a lot of time. Susan basically wasted the first day in the wrong location. She could have used that time to resupply Jim with umbrellas (or whatever) with minimal effect on their sales figures. Helen wasted half a day messing around with retailers who were closed, and Helen and Melody spent much of the first day trying to sell to pound shops and the like. So they also could have found time to resupply.


I don't think so. The teams had a mix of strong and weak.


That's how I think it was valued. The incentive is the possibility of selling the new stock. You are supposed to pick the new stock which sells best. There's no cost to restocking.


No, he said the wholesale price was £250 and the retail value was £1100. Both teams brought in more than £1100, so if either had relied on getting the retail price they'd have lost. (Not that I think they did get the retail price.)

The boardroom figures were:
Melody: sales & stock £1204, purchases £476, net: £728
Natasha: sales & stock £1154, purchases £303, net: £851

I guess the first figure is the (wholesale) value of the stock they had left at the end, plus the total value of all their sales. The second figure is their total spending, probably including the £250 for the initial palette. If so, then Melody reinvested £226 and Natasha reinvested £53. We know Natasha reinvested £20 in umbrellas, so £33 would be Susan's bracelets. Does that sound right?

Edited: I no longer think the initial £250 was included.


It's normal to get fines for breaking the rules. It's the first time he's taken away their treat, but then it's unusual for someone to do so terribly badly and yet still win. I don't recall if ever both teams have made a big loss, but it that happened, taking away the treat of the team with the smaller loss would be reasonable too.

Natasha bought 20 nodding dogs at the end of day 1, and I can't remember the exact figure Susan spent on jewellery, but it was about £100 I think, so, combined with two lots of bought umbrellas (one by Susan on Day 1, and one by Jim on Day 2) I'm guessing the initial palate costs were not included in the spend.

By focussing on the bestselling lines and ignoring the slow sellers this creates more time to sell in volume. Volume sales means they might run out of stock, hence the need to re-invest in good time. Tom only had three nodding dogs to sell and could have sold many more. If one of the team had gone back to the wholesaler earlier in the day they might have been able to buy more dogs and so sell more.


The narator said their market was the whole of London, which includes Enfield, where the wholesalers seemed to be. That must mean something, even if there were some practical restrictions.

I agree. I've just reviewed the end-of-day footage, and Susan also spends £130 on umbrellas. I've edited my earlier comment.

Tom has 3 nodding dogs at the stage they are meant to be assessing the market? How long is he without dogs before he is restocked we don't know, nor do we know if he runs out again?

I agree, there's a big question why both teams went off door to door selling, selling to pound shops and trying for retail sales - and didn't keep to the market pitches they seem to have been given and restocked more. The error isn't not restocking though - its looking for some other business plan entirely. You wonder if thats because after recent tasks the teams are thinking in other terms and/or because they decide early on that they won't make enough selling as they are meant to. Lord Sugar wants them to show they can do what he did - a majority of them think its not a good way to make money or shine and do something else.

But you can't just turn up in Covent Garden or an established market and start selling and i doubt if they had a pitch for a day available in more markets than they used?

Both teams only got three nodding dogs to start with. Tom never did get any more nodding dogs to sell. Natasha's team managed to buy another 20 in the evening, but Melody's team wasn't able to find a source with any in stock, hence the rather random choices of electronic and travel goods.


But they still had a choice of location, and if you choose right and stick with it you could sell well, especially with a TV crew hovering around to attract customers.

So they were meant to find goods that sold and restock, but there were no supplies to restock from? And Natasha who did restock with them, got blamed for not restocking while Melody didn't get blamed but couldn't anyway?

Did they have a choice, or were there just 4 pitches available and they got allocated two?

The pitch in the mall would have had to be booked, so it must have been given to them.

What all those people who blithely talk about 'finding out what sells and buying more of that' forget is that doing that takes time.

This task was not one where you set out a stall and wait for people to come and peruse your wares. The candidates had to be very pro-active in selecting an item and pushing it to the passing trade.

To get anything approaching as statistically valid sample size you would need to try for at least an hour with each item. Anything less and your results would most likely be absurdly skewed by variance.

So if you have a dozen items on the pallet - and a maximum of two people per location - you would need to spend almost the whole day just to get a feel for what sells.

Then you restock - which is what both teams did - although it seems neither spent enough on their best selling items: the nodding dogs and the umbrellas.

Susan managed to get her own 'star seller' for which she deserves considerable kudos. She did exactly what the task needed.

Where Sugar cocked up was in not thinking the task through properly. He airily assumed that the the teams would sacrifice valuable selling time by trundling back and forth to the wholesalers when the amounts of goods and money involved simply did not require them to do that.

Yes, all these pitches require permits to be obtained ahead of time - and in the case of market stalls, rents have to be paid.

It was the producers who determined the distance between the initial wholesalers and the pitches used.

Im sorry but you keep blaming the failure of the task on sugar when in fact the apprentices failed to understand the task at hand, as are forum members,who are as clueless as the contestants...

I'm sorry, but you're going to need to do a lot better than that.

Quite a few people have given detailed reasons why Sugar can be said to have made a complete cock-up of the task.

The 'proof of the pudding' was that he had to throw a tantrum and not only make up a new rule but also renege on the sub-prize.

A very dishonourable performance on his part.

He threw a tantrum as you call it because they failed to follow the task instructions,if your going to give someone £250000 i'd expect them to understand this simple task...

They did not do what he said he wanted them to do because he cocked up the design of the task and its scoring system so that had they done what he had suggested: restocked 2 to 3 times a day, they would have lost valuable selling time and risked losing the task on the scoring system that he gave.

Sugar should have realised that he'd cocked it up, learned from his mistake, and moved on, rather than embarrassing himself by chucking his toys out of the pram.

There were supplies at the wholesaler Lord Sugar provided. Melody chose to go to a different supplier.


Natasha only restocked once, on the evening of the first day. She should have restocked multiple times.


That's not how it worked. In practice, they seemed to have no trouble identifying some products as easier to sell than others. Nodding dogs were identified by both teams, for example, and that's unlikely to be a statistical fluke. Umbrellas and chargers were other items they identified.


Tom realised the dogs sold well much earlier than that. Jim cottoned onto the umbrellas earlier.

You aren't supposed to spend ages doing a detailed statistical analysis on a computer. You are supposed to "smell what sells", meaning recognise the trends yourself, using scant data. You're supposed to be courageous, albeit knowing that if you invest in the wrong stock you'll probably be able to sell it later. You are advocating a "cautious carol" approach, backed by numbers and statistics. Not what the task was about. Lord Sugar was interested in who has good instincts, who can recognise a market opportunity ahead of the crowd; and the fine was partly for lack of courage.

Nothing was cocked up. This is your opinion only, please don't represent it as fact.

It was a complete cock up from start to finish.

The task design and scoring system clearly didn't induce the candidates to do what Sugar thought it did which was why he had to make up new rules on the fly to penalise the candidates and deprive them of their treat.

He cocked up the task and then behaved dishonourably by punishing the team for his own incompetence.

Sometimes the candidates do stupid things. We've seen it before, many times. It's rare for both to get it wrong at once, and this happens to be a new task, otherwise there'd be nothing to debate.

For example, sometimes the candidates treat the shopping list game as a treasure-hunt, thinking that they should acquire the 10 items at any price.


There's no evidence that he made up a new rule, and some evidence that he didn't (ie Jim mentioned that they might get fined).

This whole argument is over a figment of your imagination.

Firstly, do you have any evidence for that?

Secondly, given that it took Helen 4 hours to get to the original wholesaler and back was that such a bad decision?


Twice would almost certainly have been enough to win the task if Sugar didn't retrofit rules. In fact, she did win the task.


I'm afraid that what you're doing here is a known piece of faulty logic called 'results based thinking'. Each team happened to sell a few dogs so you assume that, generally, dogs sell well. It's hard to explain why that's erroneous so I'll give you an example where it's more obvious:

A poker player gets a hand of 27o. The community cards are 277 and he wins the hand with a full house: sevens full of twos.

"Oh", he thinks, 27o is obviously a hand worth betting on.

He's allowing a fairly random result to inform his future playing decisions when he should be basing them purely on probability calculations.


Tom thought that he'd discovered that dogs sold well. What he'd actually noted was that he'd happened to sell a few dogs quite (one supposes) quickly. There is no reason to definitely assume that that trend would continue all day. He might just have struck luck with a few children being taken to school.


LOL, of course not.

But anyone who sells a small number of a product quickly and then ties up all his money in said stock is very likely to come unstuck a lot of the time. Not always, of course.

One of the fundamental attributes of a good entrepreneur is to be able to intuitively understand what is and is not a statistically valid sample.

The current 'Susan - yes or no' poll is a perfect example. An hour after it went up it was pretty much evens at around 9-9. Anyone who made a bet at that time based on the current ration would have lost their money.