Okay, late again, but for the sake of anyone still reading these:
Allie: -1 for STILL holding a grudge against Sean. Hey, he said you were the major cause of that loss two episodes ago – and he was right! – but he didn’t stab your mother or rape your kittens. Get your mind off the past and move on. Bitterness and pettiness are negatives.
Roxanne: -1 for also clinging to your outrage over Sean’s actions. Is there something going on between you and Allie, that what offends her offends you doubly? If I thought it was a strategy, if I thought you were deliberately encouraging Allie to go over the top in hopes that she will do something stupidly emotional later to get herself fired, maybe I wouldn’t ding you, but right now it simply looks like you’ve forgotten that you ‘girls’ are not really best buddies out to have fun: you are each other’s worst competition! There can only be one, remember??
Sean: +1 for putting in the earplugs and going to sleep. Too bad you didn’t get to hear Allie bleating Sean? Sean? when you would no longer play her emotional game.
Sean: 0 overall for volunteering to move to Gold Rush. Broken down as -1 for volunteering to leave the team with the winning record but +1 for recognizing it was volunteer or be thrown out, and getting away from the festering ill will towards you has to be a plus.
Telling moment: once Trump had laid out the rules of the challenge, the three men strode off at once, while the three women wasted a bit of time doing a happy dance. Morale is a good thing, but throughout the episode the men were one step ahead of the women, over and over and over. A total lack of friction between the three women let them work well together, but it also seems to have make them way less aggressive and driven.
Lee/Sean/Michael: -1 each for their strategizing session. Sean for his “get pretty girls” obsession. Michael for suggesting the eating contest. Lee for the money pit and all. It was clear that ALL of them assumed their only potential customers would be horny college guys. Get the cheerleaders to draw in guys. Have an eating contest to attract the fratboys. Have a money grab for broke college students. Set the food prices low for the sake of broke college guys. Uh, guys: isn’t Rutgers coed? Don’t the women students eat, too? And, way more important, what about the alums? Remember them? The people with relatively lots of money in their pockets who are a bit past the pigout contests and being drawn like moths to cheerleaders?
Way too cocky by half. As Sean put it, ‘the testosterone came flooding through my veins,’ which apparently had the unfortunate side effect of turning off their brains.
Roxanne: -1 for not getting her team moving with any sense of urgency at the start. Allie brings up approaching the cheerleader coach – and you just say something about ‘good idea, don’t forget it’ instead of sending her off to do it at once. There was really no reason for the whole team to spend an hour, maybe longer, on sampling the entire Outback food line. Those guys are professionals: ask their advice! What sells best at tailgate events? Fine, we’ll go with that. What price do you usually go with? Fine, that’s what we’ll do. And then move on to more important tasks.
Lee: +1 for having GR at the Pep rally with completed handouts.
Roxanne: -1 You knew the pep rally was at 4:45, but you didn’t have your team there, WITH handouts, in time.
Michael: +1 for securing exclusive cooperation of the cheerleaders.
Allie: +1 for talking the cheerleader coach into reneging on the exclusive deal.
Lee: +1 for getting the deejay to promote the GR tailgate event.
Michael: -1 for agreeing to give up the cheerleader exclusivity. Although he tried to paint it as merely a feint to appease the coach while knowing that Lee would stand firm, that is not at all how it looked while you were doing it. You’re too soft, too intent on being seen as a nice guy.
Lee & Sean: +1 each for their instant ‘hell no’ response to giving up the cheerleader exclusivity.
Lee: +1 for having his team out late, still promoting their event, while Roxanne has her team back in their van and driving away.
Lee: -1 for setting the prices on their food too low. Given that the measure of winning was to be HOW MUCH MONEY you brought in, you were hamstringing yourself. In the end, your team lost by $1750 to $2750. Just $1000 dollars. How many onions & chowders did you sell? 300 maybe? If so, the fact that Synergy got $5 per to your $2 could have accounted for the whole margin.
Roxanne: +1 for setting the price of everything at $5. It simplified making change, and psychologically if you have different prices people are more likely to stand there and try to mull over getting the biggest bang for their buck instead of just going ‘give me five of that and ten of that’.
Roxanne: +1 for basically concentrating on delivery. You hit on a rich ‘niche’ that the men weren’t catering to – people who cared more about spending time with their friends than ogling cheerleaders and such – and exploited it as best possible. Too bad you hadn’t though of this ahead. Instead of wasting money on flyers and such, you could have hired another delivery girl or two. Your winning margin would no doubt have been even more impressive.
Michael: -1 for not doing more sales pitches mixed into and between events.
Lee: +1 for realizing that Michael should be doing more sales and -1 for apparently not doing anything about it. At least, we weren’t shown him giving Michael instructions or he could have sent Sean in to take over the mike and sell for a while.
Allie: +1 for learning that Rutger cheer, and for generally charming the people into buying. She’s shown she’s a great salesman in many episodes.
Win/Lose points: Lee: -2 Roxanne +2. A decisive margin of victory, and the cause were decisions made by the leaders.
Reward footage: lots more happy-happy-joy-joy we are sisters and we all love each other. All well and good right now – but it’s going to make it harder and likely even bloodier the first time Synergy loses. Which of your sisters do you nominate for firing?
Boardroom:
Lee: -1 for losing sight of the goal. Your strategy focused too much on the events, too little on sales.
Michael: -1 for lack of firmness in dealing with the cheerleader situation. "passing the buck’ is NOT a way to show you have leadership abilities.
Michael: -1 for having no ‘competitive edge’ as Carolyn and then Trump put it.
Scores for the Candidates
Name : points for this episode : cumulative points [win/lose record as PM]
Roxanne : +1 : +16 [2/0]
Sean : +1 : +11 [1/0]
Lee : -1 : +7 [2/1]
Tammy: 0 : +5 [1/1]
Allie : +1 : +4 [1/1]
Fired:
Name : Score in final episode : cumulative score : # episodes lasted : pts/episode
Michael: -4 : -7 : 11 episodes : -0.6 pts/episode [1/0]
Tarek : -1 : -15 : 10 episodes : -1.5 pts/episode [0/1]
Charmaine : -10 : -4 : 10 episodes : -0.4 pts/episode [1/1]
Andrea: -6 : -1: 9 episodes : -0.67 pts/episode [2/0]
Leslie : -4 : -2 : 8 episodes : -0.25 pts/episode [0/1]
Lenny: -17 : -17 : 7 episodes : -2.4 pts/episode
Bryce : -12 : -11 : 6 episodes : -1.8 pts/episode
Dan : -12 : -12 : 5 episodes : -2.4 pts/episode
Brent: -9 : -14 : 4 episodes : -3.5 pts/episode
Teresa: -10 : -11 : 3 episodes : -3.7 pts/episode
Pepi: -6 : -5 : 2 episodes : -2.5 pts/episode
Stacy : -7 : -7 : 2 episodes : -3.5 pts/episode
Summer: -12 : 1 episode : -12 pts/episode
Note:
Another ‘Living Dead’ firing, I think. Clearly Trump thought the Gold Rush loss was due to a flawed strategy. Lee forgot the goal wasn’t to throw a memorable party but to sell as much food as possible. On the other hand, Lee has done well on other tasks while Michael has been mostly invisible as a follower and I’m sure his utter inability to make a decision when he was PM ruled him out forever in Trump’s mind. So Michael gets the boot so as to give Lee yet another chance. (Loved Lee’s lines about how he’s now working on his eighth life.)
I notice that the candidates being fire now are tending to have relatively few negative points against them in their final episode. I think this is due to two factors. First, by now they have records – Trump has separated the sheep from the goats mentally over the weeks – and they are just as likely to go based on the overall performance rather than for what they do or don’t do in the latest episode. The other factor is that the REAL screwups have mostly been weeded out by now. Doing even one or two ‘small’ wrong things stands out more now that mostly the candidates are doing good jobs.
I fear Michael has drawn the exact wrong lesson from his firing. As he put it, “The smallest little thing could come up to bite you in the ass.” IOW, he sees himself as being fired for making the wrong decision, and thus he will be even more reluctant to commit himself in future. I shudder at the thought of TEN hour color selection meetings…
Prediction: No major change. Roxanne wasn’t impressive this time out, but her team still did win decisively, and as a result she has both the highest number of points and the best win/lose ration as PM.
SBS