Originally Posted by thenetworkbabe:
“I can see the problem with selling to the trade - thats why I raised it - , but its obviously not at all clear to the candidates or both teams would have ignored the trade buys and sold the lot to the public for more. There's only two possibilities. Either both teams made the same mistake, and selling it better counted against the girls team - or there was something in the rules that suggested they target the trade or told them to do so. Given there's two subteams, going to different places, it looks as if one was told to sell to trade. If its crucial, Lord Sugar never mentions it - which suggests either he doesn't know its a crucial factor, or he does, and he's not saying so for some reason. If its an error he can't see, its a bit much to ask the candiates to spot it, and if its an error induced by the instructions, it distorts things too much to admit.
What we saw didn't support the male team winning. We saw them failing to sell retail at first, because their prices were too high. we saw them selling kegs at less than the girls did. We finally saw them selling on the South Bank at low prices . We never got any figures on how many pints each team sold, or whether the girls sold all what they had - all we see is the contrast between Richmond and the South Bank and we see nothing of the girls selling to the public in the last couple of hours. . The boys can only win because they sell less to trade, because any sales at the high initial price count more ,and because they manage to sell an awful lot at low prices levels. The girls have less to sell and higher costs per unit as they wasted some, and less left to sell retail.
Even then, the figures are not that clear - even if the girls selll none of the 100 bottles they say they have left to sell when they start their last sales push at Richmond, and you allow for 198 lost pints, and costs lost to waste, it doesn't add up to the scale of the boys win. If the difference is the trade sales, and the girls suffer from doing better doing what they were told to , there's something wrong with the task.”
“I can see the problem with selling to the trade - thats why I raised it - , but its obviously not at all clear to the candidates or both teams would have ignored the trade buys and sold the lot to the public for more. There's only two possibilities. Either both teams made the same mistake, and selling it better counted against the girls team - or there was something in the rules that suggested they target the trade or told them to do so. Given there's two subteams, going to different places, it looks as if one was told to sell to trade. If its crucial, Lord Sugar never mentions it - which suggests either he doesn't know its a crucial factor, or he does, and he's not saying so for some reason. If its an error he can't see, its a bit much to ask the candiates to spot it, and if its an error induced by the instructions, it distorts things too much to admit.
What we saw didn't support the male team winning. We saw them failing to sell retail at first, because their prices were too high. we saw them selling kegs at less than the girls did. We finally saw them selling on the South Bank at low prices . We never got any figures on how many pints each team sold, or whether the girls sold all what they had - all we see is the contrast between Richmond and the South Bank and we see nothing of the girls selling to the public in the last couple of hours. . The boys can only win because they sell less to trade, because any sales at the high initial price count more ,and because they manage to sell an awful lot at low prices levels. The girls have less to sell and higher costs per unit as they wasted some, and less left to sell retail.
Even then, the figures are not that clear - even if the girls selll none of the 100 bottles they say they have left to sell when they start their last sales push at Richmond, and you allow for 198 lost pints, and costs lost to waste, it doesn't add up to the scale of the boys win. If the difference is the trade sales, and the girls suffer from doing better doing what they were told to , there's something wrong with the task.”
I do agree that what we saw in the main body of the programme didn't suggest a victory for Kurt's team, but that's a bit of a common theme on these type of shows! The editing suggests that one team is failing miserably, and then there's a big surprise at the end! It's become a bit of a cliche.
However, there were one or two clues that the guys were doing fairly well with sales to the public. At the first venue, they were deciding whether or not to move on when one of them suggested they "do another cask... give it about an hour". That clearly indicated they'd sold at least one cask at £4.00 a pint, but suggested they'd sold more than that if they reckoned it was worth opening another cask for an hour of sales. If we assume they'd probably sold a minimum of two casks, that would have netted them £560 which was more than the girls sold to the public in total. At the South Bank they were selling at £2.50 a pint, and Nick made the comment that because of the low price, the beer was "selling like hot cakes". However, even at that "low" price, each cask was netting them around £175. We only saw the guys selling at rock bottom prices (£1 per pint) for the final five minutes of the allotted time. However, even at £1 a pint, that was only the equivalent of £8 per cask less than Rebecca's sub-team got from their first trade sale!
One interesting bit was when Tim's sub-team moved on from their pub beer festival, and Rebecca gave them a ring. She proudly announced they'd sold four kegs and looked disappointed to hear that Tim's group had only sold one and a half in the same time. However, the four kegs to the trade netted £312, but the one and a half to the public would have netted them around £367 (assuming 70 pints per keg at £3.50 per pint). It's a shame nobody did the maths ... but then again, maths wasn't exactly their strongpoint!
In the same conversation, Tim also mentioned that he had two unopened kegs. That meant they'd only allocated four kegs for sale to the public. At 70 pints per keg and £3.50 a pint, the maximum they could make would be £980. Even if they'd sold every drop, they'd have still lost the task!!
The key was selling to the public. Tim's team failed to do that so they lost. Bearing in mind that Tim was also in charge of that sub-team, I'm not too surprised that he got the boot.
