The evidence was in the programme. Both LS and the voiceover said that the task involved identifying the best selling products from those that they were given and buy more of those same items from anywhere.

Lord Sugar:-
Voiceover:-

They could only sell those items(or similar) to ones on the pallet. They had to work out which one(s) from that selection would/did sell well and buy more of the same. They could use any wholesaler to restock. One of the key aspects of the task was to "smell what sells"(as Nick said) from the range of items that started with.

The "scoring system" was stated by LS. Cash in hand + Wholesale value of stock held.

It seemed to me that neither team went back and forth to the wholesalers. In fact, as far as I could see both teams appeared to reinvest about the same number of times and at about the same points during the task. So why was only the one team fined? It can't have been because the other team lost anyway because at the point of giving the fine Sugar supposedly didn't know the result.

This whole task seems to me to have been poorly thought through from the outset and the outcome dealt with very badly by Sugar's boardroom tantrum. Either the metric of the task didn't match up with the skills it was supposed to test or the whole episode was terribly edited. Either way, the producers cocked up badly.

Exactly!

Precisely nothing about any fines for not reaching some arbitrary reinvestment level.

The teams worked to the scoring system they were given.

Sugar didn't like the result so he threw a tantrum.

Not his finest hour.

There are always detailed rules they don't explain. You should know this by now.


We're talking about whether they were allowed to invest in goods that weren't on the original pallet. We both agree they probably were. You are being belligerent for no reason here.


Melody's team went back one extra time, part way through the second day. (Jepson et al argue that this was a mistake because it lost them more selling time than it was worth, and a big part of why they lost. Lord Sugar argues that their strategy of selling to retailers was the real mistake.)

On Natasha's team, Jim also restocked on the second day, but it was too late to affect the result (and only for £20, which was insultingly low).

We know there are a lot of detailed rules that we do not know about. True

That is definitely not the same as saying that there is a fundamental element of the scoring that we don't know about. That would be absurd. It would be like watching a football match were team A beat team B 2-1 but then, after the event, being told that team B were being awarded the win because of some hidden rule.


The reason was that deliberately misunderstanding a response in order to claim someone is agreeing with you when they are clearly not is a schoolboy trick that most people grow out of.


Completely untrue.

The retail thing was a mistake on Melody's team's part. It was not as clear as it should have been because, inexplicably, they actually did manage to get a pretty good sale that way. The whole issue was further confuse by the random effects of London traffic causing what should have been a fairly short trip to take four hours.

I've never said anything about either team making a mistake with their restocking policy. Both teams seem to have go that about right from the point of view of the stated scoring method.


And if he'd gone earlier, all that would have happened (ignoring any random effects of London traffic) would have been that he would have been travelling during the part of the day when people are out and about shopping and selling when they are in a rush to get home.

There is no evidence that Natasha told Jim to only spend £20 so the reason for that can be nothing more than wild speculation.

It may be absurd but the show is pretty absurd at times. In the buying task there is a fundamental rule that you have to try to knock at least 1p off the initial price you're quoted for an item, otherwise you get fined heavily on the deal. In the first iteration of the same task in Series 1, this wasn't explained, and we were treated to a comedy montage of Tim trying to knock 1p off items, with the implication that this was a very strange thing to be doing. The rule wasn't in fact explained until Series 3, and Tim was left to twist in the wind for two years.

So that is another example of a rule that forces candidates to act in a non-businesslike manner.

And not having these rules available is deceiving the viewers - i.e. those who are paying for the programme.