Just watched the last episode. How interesting it is that SrAlan appears to be looking for a business partner who is willing to sell low standard goods (in this case, paraffin based candles) whilst passing them off as high-end? Margins take precedence over morality?
If I were looking for a business partner, I would be looking for characteristics such as honesty, trustworthiness and vision.

'twas ever thus.


This may be why he's a self-made millionaire and you're not.

'High end' is not a legal term, so there can be no 'passing off'. If they had described the paraffin candles as beeswax or soy, that would have been passing off. Karren was quick enough to make them take down the 'recommended retail price' claim. They will let you talk a load of bollocks to make a sale, but they won't let you lie.

I agree, wonkey, that there is no legal problem here, which is why I titled it 'morals' - or ethics, perhaps. Implication is certainly 'passing off' - you can imply, through your packaging and branding and pricing, that goods are of high quality, when what's inside is dross. No overt lying took place, just a rather tawdry means of doing business.

Trollface, what you say is true. I am not a self-made millionaire. But do you mean, then, that self made millionaires dont employ people with the characteristics of honesty, trustworthiness and vision?

Series 6, in the scavenger hunt task the guys were spinning some completely nonsense stories to get the prices down and while Karen admitted she wouldn't have done it that way she conceded it worked and essentially endorsed the tactic. They won't allow you to make false claims but they will let you lie under certain circumstances. I would otherwise agree with what you said.

Yes, true, and this is where (I can only apologise for making the same point in two different threads) the one-off nature of the tasks makes it very unlike a real business. Sell a heap of tat as high end in the real world and you will never get any follow-up orders. Sell it on the Apprentice and you have done your job well.

Very good point.
The Apprentice's biggest problem is also its greatest 'entertainment' value - the environment SrAlan creates is one of fear and pressure where he or she who shouts loudest, wins. A really good manager creates an atmosphere which nourishes creativity, vision, tenacity, enthusiasm and teamwork. None of these characteristics can flourish in the shark pool of The Apprentice.

I don't know if that is fair, in this case. People were buying the scent of the candle more than that it was made of paraffin, and as long as they didn't lie about the ingredients if people liked the scent enough to pay the price they were asking, that's up to them. We couldn't smell them so we couldn't really evaluate either product.

I thought the basic point was not to get so focussed on sales that you forgot whether you were actually making a profit or not. That seems like a fair business point to me, more so than many things on the show.

I think the difference is that in that episode they might of been stretching the truth, it was still up to the seller, wether they sold the item or not. In this episode what James did was a bare faced lie and against consumer regulations (or whatever law). It's the same as a retailer advertising a sale, when in fact the product was never sold at that price etc.

As for making something look more expensive than it is lots of companies do that, Apple are famous for it.

Do you remember the Apprentice winner who did a task serving low quality food? She won that year...unsurprisingly. I always thought she was a woman after his own heart. Then, after a while she went off and had a baby as far as I recall.

^^ the same with the Hot Dogs in this series, Karen said on YBF that they were disgusting.

I think she meant they were disgusting with the garnishes that Robert added, ironically in an attempt to make them more up-market.

As for the topic at hand, businesses try to make the maximum possible profit margin on cheap stuff, and that's the way it's always worked. Ethics may enter into it if you're somehow hurting people to get the lowest possible production costs (hence Fairtrade food and the uproar about how Chinese manufacturing workers are treated), but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with selling for the highest price you can get.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...ndulgence.html

Point taken but the truth of the matter is that the stories were lies and my point is that whilst the situations may be different at the end of the day both were lies at the end of the day which is the point I was making.


The implication was very much that it was the extras that made the hot dogs horrible and that was what Karen was commenting on.

I mean that Sugar has made his millions by selling tat at as high a price as the market would allow. That he doesn't see this as unethical should hardly be a surprise.

Nice thread title btw.

But there isn't (and never has been) any direct correlation between how much something costs to make and how much it should be sold for. All good business people will try to sell at the maximum price the market will pay. If there's a big gap between that and the cost of production, then you've got high margins.

Some categories of product offer very high margins indeed (perfume, high end skin care for eg, costing pennies to make while being sold for many multiples of that). Others offer much lower margins (milk for eg). A strong brand will allow you to charge a higher price for essentially the same product (coke versus supermarket cola).

There's nothing dishonest or untrustworthy about selling at the highest price possible - that's just good business. However you can't tell lies. So Karen was right to pull James up on his phony RRP. That's misinformation. Equally they must be honest about ingredients - but it's up to the public to decide if it was worth paying £35 for a paraffin based candle.

If I grasped the point correctly, the more expensive soy candles burned slowly and cleanly, whereas the paraffin ones burnt faster and with a dirtier flame. That would not come across in a pitch or street sale, but a client like the hotel would find it out over time.

Surely if you lie you are making false claims

Alan Sugar has made his fortune by selling low quality products. He doesn't consider it immoral.

I personally would would be very ill at ease selling something cheap to make at very high prices. I would feel like I was taking the customers for fools, and earning money for the sake of it rather than creating something useful and doing something good in the world.

I don't feel jealous of super-rich people, because I find the way most of them make so much money immoral.


Also, soya and beeswax are natural and don't produce unhealthy smoke, unlike paraffin.

And the hotel bought the losing team's soy ones, didn't they? Or am I getting mixed up? Perhaps they did that because they were better quality soy, we don't know. The trouble was the losing team made a quality product and then sold it like it was a cheap product - if they hadn't done that, if they had prioritised the hotel over the gift shop, for example, and set stock of the defusers aside - they might well have won and then the point of the programme would have been make a good product and sell it to the people who will pay the better price for it.

By the way - "soy" is an Americanism. We're supposed to say soya!

The thing is, follow up customers would not buy the Geordie's tatty cheap candles whereas the other brand would have likely had repeat custom. The problem with the format of the show is often that sustainability of a product is totally overlooked for immediate sales. So one product may have more legs if this was the real world but in the world of the Apprentice what you sell on a random Tuesday in London is all that matters.

This was really emphasised in the first episode of Series 2. The girls' team realised that they could get supermarket rejects for nothing and sell them really cheap, because there was no need to make the business plan sustainable. Towards the end of the day they could even afford to give out some fruit to people free of charge, in case there was any penalty for stock left over. They were told off for it, but it really highlighted a flaw in the format. A flaw which has never been rectified.

Agree and too many of the tasks on the British version of the show involve the candidates running around like headless chickens selling stuff for whatever they can. This is not Britain's Next Top Salesperson.

The (s)he who shouts loudest wins is often the option taken by a lot of organisations who take the fact that these people are the best leaders.

I did an Army Selection Board once - and we had a very pushy and loudmouthed older candidate in our group. She never listened to anyone else's point of view and in one of the "command tasks" we had (ladies didn't have a team leader back then - fatal!) we had to construct a bridge affair to get us all onto a block fom a point 8 feet away with divergent supports using 2 planks of wood and no-one touching the floor.

she refused to listen to me when I suggested laying the planks down at angles - insisting that we had to move the planks then throw them back to the next person. after watching her attempts to complete the task, I just went to the front - laid the planks out as i had suggested 10 minutes before , walked up to the block and invited the others to join me.... funnily enough - the one who didn't succeed got through the board - the quiet one who just got on with the task and completed it didn't because she wasnt authoritative enough!

I'd rather be behind a quiet capable leader than a gobby loudmouth!