Set the prices too high? Nick knew that was Maria steam-rolling over Alice's more sensible pricing, and she was backed up by the rest of the sub-team, so its forgivable she gave ground. I wouldn't know what to charge for that stuff either, tea and a cake at a country house? Just make the cakes chocolate & cream and you'll sell loads...

Maria is of course completely mental, gobby and would be impossible to work with - but makes good tv. So thats that.

Alice did a fine job, and handled herself very well in the boardroom. Navdep's no fool, but she's clearly a game-player and hasn't contributed much overall.

Possibly Alice should've brought back Patrick, he's been pretty unremarkable and might have gone. But Alice - only fired because she's not 'good tv.' Or am I missing something?

(Oh and as for those sales figures, I'm sure it came down to which country house had the most visitors that day, not their business decisions)

I wondered as well. I've just mentioned this in one of other threads.

I guess Sugar chose to sack her because he hasn't seen how Navdeep and Maria may perform as PMs yet. Maybe he felt he had seen what he needed to see from Alice?

Alice should have brought back Patrick because I think Sugar's dying to sack him.

Weren't they on different sides of the same house>

The place where Alice went wrong was being the PM on a task where, rather than losing by any obvious mistakes, they lost by choosing the wrong approach at the very beginning.

I think Patrick might well have been the best choice for Alice to bring back. He was a poor PM in a task that should have been a good one for him and was lucky that Max contributed so little. He was also lucky Shaun didn't bring him back on the second task. He did contribute on this task, if less vocally than some, but so did everyone else. I think he'd have gone if she'd brought him in.

Indeed, Sugar and Nick were both clearly a bit scathing of her bringing Navdeep in, and felt she was making a decision for personal rather than business reasons.

I disagree that Navdeep is any more a game player than anyone else. She wants to win and means to fight her corner, but there doesn't seem to be anything underhand about this.

I could be wrong, but Navdeep seems to be one of the biggest players of the 'just criticise everything the PM does' so they get fired tactic. Maria being the other main offender.

I completely agree about Maria, she has criticised every PM she has worked with in some way.

I disagree about Navdeep though - she argued with the PM this week and last week, but wasn't shown to before that. She didn't seem to have any problem with Ashleigh in Week 1, and in Week 2 she stuck up for Lucy when she was arguing with the sub-team.

The main thing she did wrong was bring Navdeep back into the board room.

Ha, maybe she's learned that trick since the first couple of weeks. I agree that not bringing back Patrick was a mistake, but there is no way that Maria deserved to stay over Alice. That was true before the boardroom, but the way they both acted (one good, one terrible) with Lord Sugar proved beyond any doubt who should have got the boot.

Maria stayed in because she is good TV (having wrecked the last two tasks) and Nev to maintain the efnik quota (Balotelli jnr is out next time he loses).

Alice's failing (apart from not punching Maria) was not to define the objectives from the start. Having gone for the 1940s, she then went for costly food and high prices, stipulating "traditional British food with a twist". However, as in all Sugar programmes, you only win by selling cr*p at cheap prices in bulk, which she only attempted at the very end, when it was too late.

Oh and they did muck about in The Langham! Ironically enough, I thought of a bet I lost to a shouty, mental Irish woman many years ago, which should have involved my buying her lunch at the nearby and similarly named Langan's. Fortunately, we fell out before she could enforce the win.

It was one of those tasks where lots of little mistakes were made but not one obvious one which cost the team the task. Alice's direction on day 1 was poor and she should have corrected the pricing error sooner than she did. As such, it wasn't unreasonable for Sugar to fire her - although equally I definitely think candidates have done much worse in other tasks and still survived.

Alice's fate was signposted from the opening minutes, from her declaration up front that she had won every task so far to the fact that the narrative for the episode had no particular thrust to it to show what any one individual on the team was doing wrong. If you can't find someone to blame, the PM goes almost by default.

David is so getting fired at the first opportunity now, though. He's not just a worse candidate than Alice - he's arguably the weakest of the lot.

Some random thoughts on the episode and other bad punnery in my weekly recap:

http://slouchingtowardsthatcham.com/...-of-earl-grey/

That's the depressing thing about so many Apprentice tasks. Managing cost at the expense of everything else - quality, service, any kind of coherent strategy - tends to win tasks 90% of the time. In the real world having a reputation for poor quality and bad service would mean a business would die quickly. In Apprentice World, however, where it's just a one-off deal, such real world considerations are irrelevant. It's not a great lesson to be teaching aspiring entrepreneurs. Why go for quality when you can just rip people off. There's one born every minute etc ...

Sigh.

Alice made so many mistakes, it's hard to nail which one was key to her being fired..

The 1940's was a terrible choice as none of them seemed to know anything about it. The idea of it appealing to tourists was awful. Mostly though they could've gone cheap and cheerful and got away with it, but Alice got sucked into the teas being top quality.

The argument about the price had to be based on profit margin, and it seemed no-one bothered to work that out. There was no need for the street research and I've no idea why Alice made them do it.

Alice seemed to leave everything open, so she never made a decision day one, that way she could pass the buck later to the sub team.

Her biggest mistake though was not bringing that waste of space Patrick back to the boardroom.

I didn't like the idea either - but I didn't like the Mad hatter either, nor could I think of a decent idea.


I think the street research was a good idea, businesses do such things to see what people would be willing to pay. Shame that Maria just forced her price idea on everyone, for that the PM is partly to blame. She should have stuck at the cheaper price, but Maria should have got in more trouble than she did for her silly high prices.


I agree. Although her biggest mistake was not being as 'good telly' as Maria. She was easily the person you'd bet on running a good business or employing out of those three in the boardroom.

Both ideas were awful. I actually went "win" when she said history, I was thinking more upstairs downstairs though.


Andrew was as much to blame for the price going up. They had a point though, if you don't get the high price, then drop it, they had a lot of costs to cover and could only do 30 heads a go, they should've thought outside the tent like David did. Then had 2 price ranges, the whole experience for the high, and outside for a bit cheaper, then they could see how traffic was going. (In fairness though they are young, and hindsight is a wonderful thing).


She reminds me of Clare. I had a flashback to when LAS told whoever was PM that week "You better speak up because she's going to make mincemeat of you... ".Maria strikes me as the cleverest there, you could see her mind click to how she was going to survive in the car to the task, when Alice talked about working as a team.

Along with some of the other posters above, I believe that her main downfall was in not selecting Patrick as one of the three to be brought back into the board room.

Having seen him pitch a couple of episodes ago, I wouldn't expect him to be articulate enough or have sufficient savvy to defend himself.

LordAlan would probably say 'Dahnt bring back the people you bladdy don't like, bring back the bladdy weakest member. I ain't stupid.' And he probably has a point.

How rude. Navdeep stayed in because she's competent, argued well for herself in the boardroom and, as Sugar and Nick seemed to feel, shouldn't have been brought back in.

Maria should have gone She's infuriating.
David was a mess but am finding his incompetence strangely endearing (sexist comments aside).

As I much as I liked Alice LS had no other option because Alice was responsible for them losing the task. She wasted the first day going to posh places tasting and turning off her phone . Her idea was sound about going for quality end of the market, but that doesn't mean you have to buy your products from the most expensive places.

Then her pricing was too high . People who visit stately homes are not necessarily rich .

Then again Alice was a far better PM then David who really hasn't a clue and couldn't organise a 8*** up in a brewery .

So that's why didn't he fire Maria 'ooo gets on 'is wick and is loike a bull in a china shop?

It went wrong when she confused the theme and didn't pursue it into the implications for sales and price. She went for quality teas and a 1940s theme that didn't relate. She then got stuck on high quality food and spent too long researching it. Her market research team was sent out without any questions and it got evidence for a higher price - and a lower price as well. That was inherent in the market research process they were limited to. Alice never asked the basic question whats the market and what can it afford. What her market research team got back depended entirely on what question was asked, of whom. If you ask someone who has tea at the Waldorf you will get an answer of £25. If you ask someone outside asda, you will get £5 as your answer. She never knew what her market was, but she still took the less safe option of going high. Because she spent so long testing the quality food, she didn't test the market research on the phone. She would have done better doing the market research herself and leaving someone else to have high tea. And because she went for higher quality food regardless of the market research, her costs was going to be higher and her sales probably lower too. She was so taken with her high tea experience that she even went for specialist teas - rather than going top selfsame asda and buying their earl grey.

Part of that is inherent in the problems doing market research for a specific market with a random sample of people somewhere else - thats the producers input to the mess. On the plus side, she got things running efficiently. The mystery is why her sales were so low - and that could be price, location or David falling over into a good idea by having more people served outside - where they were good free adverts and more people could be sold meals. Alice also started with the idea of a posh tea amd that itself may have ended up as a key disadvantage - in that a party offered more options and sounded more attractive than a tea. David proved totally useless again, but was saved by Ashleigh, who had a better concept and admin skills, and Lucy's product . However, it could have been the case that all David's customers would have walked away if they had been kept waiting anywhere else than where they could see a chance to get on TV.

Maria hadn't done much wrong. The market research did throw up people who would pay £25 - and they were the sort of people who would buy afternoon tea.- in London. The rest of the research team didn't want to go low either, and the profit margin and result might have been worse with that food if they had. Alice just didn't probe enough. The railway station idea that had 2 team members wandering aimlessly was Alice's - she didn't say where it was - and they didn't ask - so its hardly their fault alone. There was no reason for bringing Navdeep back. There was no evidence that the front of house team failed to go out and get customers - or that it could have given everything else it was doing. Given her team's cakes had been criticised, and one of her team had been pointed out (Steven??) by Lord Sugar for failing to show the catering expertise he claimed, Alice missed the last chance she had to escape by vringing the wrong people back.

Basically , she got the tactics right, but the strategy wrong in a task where there wasn't enough information, and the other PM should have lost badly for having no strategy and getting the tactics and organisation all wrong.

Alice did make it very hard for him. She brought the two wrong people into the boardroom. She could have taken Patrick who did literally nothing at all other than eat cakes and drink tea at the "market research" and the other guy (keep forgetting his name!) who has experience in this field, but then spent bucket loads on ingredients. Both may have went over her. Instead she brought 1 person back who did nothing wrong at all (Navdeep) and one person who is going to fight like hell to save her skin. She made herself the only option.

Some great reasoning there (especially from thenetworkbabe),I can see she did do things wrong - though compared to Maria, who I think would just be impossible to work with and doesn't deserve to win, still a dodgy choice. But it's fair in some ways, I agree.

Agree - she might have survived if she had brought back both boys as they would be more likely to pass the buck onto each other rather than gang up on Alice. Looking forward to seeing Maria as team leader.

She faffed about testing things on the first day, which confused her ideas. All she gave the subteam were meaningless buzzwords - tea that is 'British with a twist!', 'classic', '1940's', 'innovative', 'stylish', 'high class'... Real drivel, though the subteam should have made something better from it.

That to me was a far worse failure than the pricing (which again was Maria making a bullish decision based on sketchy market research). If they had sat down and thought about the market properly then their organisation and perfectionism could have won it for them.

All she had to do was say 'British high tea - one price for adults, half price for children' and she'd have been made. There was no need for '40s' or 'with a twist'. Classic British high tea isn't something many native Brits have ever eaten, and tourists love the idea! She'd have been made! (I grew up 7 miles away from Blenheim Palace - it's always heaving with Americans and other wealthy tourists, and it's the only real stately home of that calibre in the area for local visitors, so they really should have been a captive market).

It wasn't completely clear, but the 'concessions' they were talking about I assume were a child's price? But only £3 off the adult price isn't going to attract anyone on a budget. Parents usually expect to pay half price for children under 12 - that is just the way it is (being a parent myself!). Anything else is just greedy. And the price was far too high to start with - it should have been £10 max for an adult, £5 for a child. And what was that line from one of them (Maria or Andrew) about 'old people need to pay the same'? If OAPs are supposedly your 'target market' (if you're going for the nostalgia route) then you attract them in by dropping the price a bit! Not as much as for a child, but just a bit to entice them in.

The two-tier pricing strategy someone else suggested could also have been good - a basic British tea (the cheapest sarnies, basic scone, jam and cream, ordinary tea - all people actually want most of the time!) for, say £6, and the whole caboodle to include fancy cakes and pastries for the £10 rate. Or an 'inside' and 'outside' rate like David (eventually!) worked out. Marketing it as a 'traditional picnic option' could have really worked!

But, as others have said, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and the arrogance of youth is something that will never change until they have some experience behind them! But my own daughters, aged 14 and 18, were saying the same as me, so not all teenagers are arrogant, greedy, rude so-and-sos with no idea of what is reasonable! Thank goodness!