wooba.com - for your clicky finger

Yes, I meant cents in that sense. Okay, so the Apprentice peeps go on QVC and hawk some items. The women chose It Works!, a cleaning product and the men took some George Foreman ripoff grill product called DeLonghi Retro Panini Grill. What I don’t get is that the men won by $10, which is true, since they sold 252 units at $71.25 for a total of $17955 and the women sold 659 units of the cleaning product for $27.23 for a total of $17944.57. While that’s nice and all, what about net profit? Shouldn’t they be basing the winner on profit? Did the Donald forget why his casinos went bankrupt? Now, perhaps QVC doesn’t want you to know how much they are profiting from each particular item, and perhaps The Apprentice signed a contract so that they wouldn’t give away any of that info, but still, it boggles my business mind.

I would think the women won based on profits, as I guess QVC gets the It Works! for probably $9 each (probably less) and I would venture to guess they get the grill for maybe $25 each. Looking at the profits for the teams, that would make the women winning, $12013.57 to $11655 in profits, before subtracting production costs and pay for the CS reps, of course. That’s just an estimated guess on product prices based on what I’ve seen in the retailing sector. Assuming QVC gets the stuff directly from the manufacturer, which I would think they would, based on the volume they can do.

Just from a business standpoint, gross sales doesn’t mean jack. Either team could have sold the item at just $1 or $2 above what QVC gets it for, and they would have totally blown away the other team with volume sales. Heck, since profit wasn’t mentioned at all, each team coulda just made each item $1 and made QVC lose money and won this ‘business challenge’.

I think the grill should have been priced at $69.95, and the cleaning product around $19.95. Not that I would pay that price for each item or anything, both products seemed pretty lame, with better alternatives out there (George Foreman Grill and a billion other types of cleaning products).

Gross sales. Bah. Great lesson, Donald. And yes, I Replayed The Apprentice and replayed the part where the Donald says the winning team would be based on gross sales. No way I’m gonna miss CSI in HDTV, thus The Apprentice was relegated to commercial-free viewing.

http://apprentice.yahoo.com