The cloche this episodes Oud

And like when Vincent was losing PM in Series 7, he sucked up to Jedi Jim and refused to bring him back to the boardroom, leading to his firing

Are you mad?! Alex was great, has contributed a lot to most tasks and was much less at fault than Kurt and Neil

Alex and Jason's one-liners and accents are what's making this series so entertaining

At least Alex did the "get your Apples and Pears" routine last week and actually sold.

That's true, but it does make it look a bit odd when someone who hasn't really done well in the tasks wins. Actually, I think Susan might have been the best choice to win - her business plan was over-optimistic, but it was less flawed than any of the other plans and Susan had been a better performer than Tom on the tasks (in my opinion, which I accept may be biased). It seems all the more obvious a choice given that he later did invest in Susan - probably in a somewhat adjusted version of her original plan.

For me it was a choice between Helen and Susan in that series. Helen would be a perfect old-style Apprentice winner - BUT I think that she would have made an equally good winner in this new format. She had the business instinct, the creativity, the open-mindness. She was doing really well. Most people thought she was just a good manager, but she demonstrated much more than management skills.

Susan was also really good and throughout the series she had shown everyone how clever and insightful she really is. Susan should have won to be honest, more so than Tom.

Tom's win was felt almost like a set up.

The big problem with Helen was that her business idea was terrible. So was Tom's, but at least he had another product ready to go.

i think for some of the more exclusive items the mall was the best place to go. you cant get high end stuff from the souk, just tourist tat

Just got around to watching.

S'funny cos I've thought Zee was a bit of a tosser all the way through but it seems like he was just royally stitched up in this episode.
The rest of the team, and the sub-team particularly, just didn't seem interested in even attempting to contribute.

If it'd been me I might've told them all to wait in the hotel bar and go and do it all myself.
I'm sure I could have managed to buy more than 4 items in a day.

As for the whole "quality" issue, it might've been discussed but it wasn't like they got somebody from the hotel to accept or reject items so, in the end, they could have got away with buying any old tat.

Zee made another big mistake by going for the most difficult objects first, " our strategy is to get the more complicated out of the way", You should always get the easier objects first .
Like in an exam tackle the easy questions first, this leaves you more time to tackle the more difficult stuff

I agree that Susan would also have been a worthy winner, although she didn't help herself in several of the tasks.

The problem with series 7 is not so much that Sugar chose the wrong winner, it's more the mismatch between the process and the outcome. Sugar is looking for someone he can work with who has an investable business idea. As we found with Helen, being the best candidate in terms of task performance means nothing if you have nothing worth investing in. There's a huge difference between being a good business manager and a good entrepreneur - the two aren't necessarily the same thing, and that's something the new process fails to recognise.

I'm not sure "any old tat" would of worked, the hotel clearly had a guy checking the items, he did pick up on the fact the "shirt thingy" was modern not traditional, and no one on here yet has been able to say what the difference is.

Sorry, disagree with that. The way to win this particular task is to target the items on which you think you can get the biggest discount.

Things like frankincense crystals were easily available in the souks but only cost something like 20 dirhams. Let's say they do cost 20 and one team manages to negotiate them down to 10. The potential fine for the other team is 10 dirhams.

The oud, on the other hand, was negotiated down from 1850 to 990 dirhams, a saving of 860 dirhams - and therefore a fine of 860 for Zee's team.

To be fair, it did look like both teams had identified a similar approach. If you'd asked me up front, I would have targeted items like the oud (because it was unknown), the tiles (which were clearly going to be expensive) and the palm tree first. I'd then also have looked at the flag (which turned out to be cheaper than I thought), kandura and the falcon hood next and left the cheaper looking items (frankincense, coffee pot) until last. That wouldn't have been quite the correct order with hindsight, but it's a starting point.

Put it this way: if team A bought oud, tiles and falcon hood (for me, the hardest 3 items) and team B bought the other 5 (easier) items and both negotiated reasonable discounts, then team A would still have won because their discounts would be so much bigger.

As I've hypothesised elsewhere, it was odd that we didn't see either team go after the tiles. My guess is that one (or both) of two things happened:

1. It's not the sort of product that's sold in many places, the teams discovered that it would be a long trip to go and get them, and decided it would take too much time just to get one item.

2. It's not the sort of product for which there is much competition, which means a supplier wouldn't have to offer much (if any) discount to sell them, even to a hotel chain. The teams phoned up, realised they would be on to a loser, and decided against it.

No idea if this is the case, but it seems consistent with the fact that we saw neither team attempt to buy what was obviously a very expensive item. (Remember that Myles' team was fined £385 (about 2,200 dirhams) for the market value of the tiles and the hood, and falcon hoods cost maybe £50 or so, which puts the tiles at over £300 - on a par with the oud.)

No idea what the difference is, but it would have been a check for style/design, not for quality. There's never been any indication in any of these discount buying tasks that poor quality will be fined. All the hotel guy was doing was to check the products against the required spec, and none of those dictated product quality. ("Quality" is too ambiguous anyway - how do you define for the teams what is good enough and what isn't?)

Well you can tell if the kandura was good quality or cheap tat, buy the finish, material etc, same for the flag and most likely for the Oud, coffee pot and Falcon Hood.

Palm tree a bit harder, but I'm sure if they brought one back that was nearly dead and on it's last legs, but got it at a good price they would of been marked down.

Oh. I agree that you can tell the difference between a really expensive kandura and a tatty one, but the problem in specification is where you draw the line. Is "quite good" good enough quality, or does it need to be "very good", if you know what I mean. When you're not at one extreme or the other it's a very subjective judgement, which is why I think it's one the producers deliberately side-step, or else we would get all sorts of silly fines on quality issues - it's unsatisfying enough as it is when the value of the winning team's fine is more than the value of the items it actually bought.

I could well be wrong, but it just feels like one level of complexity too many to factor in quality. Although I'd love to have seen what would have happened if one team had brought back a threadbare tree. So maybe there is some basic rule about a product being "fit for purpose" - so, new rather than secondhand and of "acceptable" quality rather than necessarily good quality.

We're definitely thinking about this too much now. Zee was still a bit of a twit!

Yes, quality would hamper the show to the extreme, I'm pretty sure they could of found some sort of "touristy Oud" with the word "luv form the UAE" emblazoned on it...lol

LOL.

I mean, why would Sugar care about quality on this task when he quite clearly couldn't give two hoots about it on any other task, where it's all about the bottom line and sales?

One of my soapbox issues with the show is that it puts too much emphasis on just flogging as much cheap gear as you can without considering the importance of quality and service in encouraging repeat purchase. Some of the behaviours and tactics we see on tasks are deplorable - they're appropriate to the demands of a one-off task, but they're not how any decent business would work. I can remember a catering task in season 5 where Yasmina won by ruthlessly cutting costs to the bone and producing a result for a corporate event where the food was unpalatable and the service was appalling. The customer complained, she was given a small fine and still won the task. What kind of a message does that send?

Also, the show allows candidates to promise the world without ever having to deliver it. So if anyone remembers the biscuit task in season 7, Jedi Jim Eastwood secured a big order from Asda which won him the task, which he achieved by basically saying that they would invest millions in a TV campaign and get celebrity endorsement and about a million other things. For a cheap-as-chips biscuit brand! I'd like to see an FMCG company which would have signed off on the budget for that - it was a complete non-starter, but he got away with it because he knew he would never have to make it happen. Again, what message does that send?

Sorry. Rant over. Repeat again and again: it's only a TV show ...

But thats really the Amstrad brand all over, cheap tat, that is bought once and never again! LAS built his empire on the back of a market stall, where repeat business isn't really expected.

For some of his products, yes, but to be fair he has taken the brand from word processors to computers to (the horrible) emailer phones, to health & beauty to Sky boxes (now sold), so there has been an element of protecting his brand to his success. He produces cheap, decent value stuff but he gives the impression sometimes that cost is the only thing that matters on tasks, bugger the quality. It's a shame that the nature of the show means there's never an acknowledgement that what works on a task and what works in the real world aren't necessarily the same thing, or that focussing on day 1 sales is not necessarily the way to build a long-term business.

It doesn’t help that many tasks in the show tend to be focused on a rather limited area of business, the hard sell. The competitive nature of the tasks and the boardroom often mean that skills that are useful in the real business world are a drawback in the show.

Perfect example for me was the series 7 task where they went to France. Tom was the team leader and identified the best products to sell but was talked out of them by Melody (think that was her name) who misrepresented the market testing they did in France. She also didn’t identify that the big department store was the most important customer (Helen sold them loads of the product that Tom had wanted to go with). She then refused to share any of the appointments she’d made earlier in the day until suddenly realising she couldn’t make them all. Even with that she still sold less than Susan did to the small retailers.

In the board room she was praised for being so strong willed and Tom lambasted for being weak (that was justifiable as he was too much of a walkover). But her actions lost them that task.

However Melody went the next week and Tom won overall. Probably due to this being the 1st time Lord Sugar was going to invest his own money so wanted someone who would be easy to work with (and control maybe), would listen to feedback and wouldn’t blindly plough forward with a stupid idea regardless of conflicting opinions or evidence. Helen would have been a certainty in the old format but she had no experience of running her own business and her plans were terrible.

I agree.

One of the only "fair" tasks that they do, IMO, is the one where they have to do a trolley-dash around a cash & carry and then start flogging the stuff and then go back and buy more stuff with the money they make.
At least, in that task, they do total up the value of the remaining stock and record it as assets.

That's about the only task which is really a fair representation of real business philosophy IMO.

It was his fault because he was a terrible project manager.

First, I feel that ANYONE who is PM on this classic Apprentice task should know by now that there should be a double verification--they should specifically ask locals if an item has more than one possible meaning.

Second, he should have settled that little leadership mini-rebellion more decisively right when it first popped up. He showed weakness by simply folding and making a clear enemy into the sub-team leader.

Third, while he was right about the souk being a better deal, he made a big mistake in not handling that environment himself.

Fourth, his boardroom picks made him look like a total idiot.

Fifth, he didn't take the time to renegotiate the flag price after the mistake--he only made the attempt at the last minute after they'd already made both flags and he had no leverage.

Sixth, he made some rather arrogant statements right to Sugar's face. There's a line between confidence and arrogance, and you don't dare cross it right in front of the person judging you. While that can't be said to have made him lose the task, it DID largely contribute to his firing.

Probably a few more too.

That's not how it worked though.

The way the task worked (at least that portion of it) is that both clients were allowed to pay on a "pay how much you think the service was worth" basis. In the end, Yasmina's client paid more than Rocky's client, because Yasmina at least made an effort to put on a classy event, whilst Rocky's team titted around in togas, and served up food that basically amounted to being Doritos with smears of ketchup on.

It was, in effect, the opposite of what people remember it as - an attempt to counter accusations that the show didn't care about quality of product by allowing the client to determine the value of what they were given, after they'd been given it. Which I think they should do more of, until it sticks. At least on the corporate part of the task, Yasmina gave a higher quality service than Rocky did, regardless of how much her ingredients cost and how good her team were at cooking.

That's not how I remembered it - thanks for correcting.

Agreed,. It's the one selling task that takes into account that at the end of it treats the 'business' as a going concern.