Continuing her reign of obnoxiousness, Stephanie was finally eliminated in The Apprentice Season 10 Episode 10. With today being Thanksgiving and all, every other show is taking a break for the week, but luckily nobody watches The Apprentice anyway (the lack of competition may actually result in a viewership increase for a change).
With Liza partnerless, Brandy moves back over to her team. Brandy fears that Liza has not been very strong, but she does have a lot of experience defending herself in the boardroom.
They will be going to PA to work at QVC, selling products on air.
Clint is the project manager for the men; Liza is the project manager for the women.
On the helicopter ride over, Steuart tells Clint he reminds him of his father, which Clint takes to mean that he’s too immature to be The Apprentice. While they talk, Brandy and Liza just sit in silence.
At the meeting, the boys come up with a strategy to pretend they want a watch, when in reality they want the purse. Liza says she’s interested in the watch as well, to which Brandy just responds that it’s Liza’s decision to make as the project manager.
After the teams are done discussing their plans, they have to negotiate for both items and time slot. Both teams come up with two items, and Clint thinks he’scan just bark orders and the girls will follow. He tells Liza to let him know both their items they want and then negotiate from there. Brandy declines, offering one item at a time. Not that this matters because Clint just pretends he wants both the same items they want, although he wants neither.
Following that, the issue of time comes up. Again, Clint asks the ladies to go first, but Brandy’s not going to let him steamroll them that easy, so she declines to answer. Clint would like to present last. He offers a compromise: you pick the product first, and we get the time we want. That works for Liza. She chooses the watch, and the girls will present first. Once the negotiations are done, Clint lets them know that all sounds good… and they’ll take the purse.
Although they just got duped, the women are comfortable with that decision, thinking the men have bit off more than they can chew with that $100+ handbag. The women markup their $30.56 watch to $69.50, a compromise between Liza’s higher price and Brandy’s lower one.
Clint is having a little too much fun with this purse. He’s probably going to buy a few of them himself. Clint does not want to cross the $200 line, a 50% markup, although Steuart would like to go higher. They settle on $194.97, with a plan to sell the installment payment plan, three payments of $64.99.
We have heard the phrase profit margin about 5 times because that’s what the contestants seem to think the point of the task is. It’s not. I’m not even entirely sure any of them understand the concept. It’s all about net profits, regardless of margin. With that in mind, the girls will have to sell more products than the men, which at least Brandy realizes.
One person will have to be the guest host along with QVC’s professional host, while the other person will be the producer. Realizing he doesn’t exactly have the look to go with the products they’re pushing, Clint defers to Steuart as the guest host, just hoping he can gain some composure instead of laughing like he has been (not that Clint isn’t amusing). Liza appoints Brandy as the presenter because only 7% of QVC viewers are African American. What a copout answer. Brandy has no complaints. She will do whatever the boss wants, and she really does not want to make any decisions.
From there, those who were picked as producers will have to go behind the cameras and figure out what they have to do. Liza’s initial fixation is on the Isaac Mizrahi sign that she has Brandy keep moving. Once they actually get on air, Liza is spitting out a bunch of words, which seems to be working, at least at first. After a while, they just decide to ignore her. When all’s said and done, they run out of time, which Liza takes on her own shoulders.
Unlike the women, the men had plenty of time to prepare their presentation because they got the later slot. Steuart seems quite comfortable with the product. They manage their time effectively as well.
Isaac thought Brandy seemed very natural, perhaps redeeming herself for her last two bad presentations. Although Steuart was very smooth, their pricing is the big question mark. That said, he’s not so sure that the watch was not undervalued.
Brandy thinks Liza did a good job, though she disagrees with Liza’s reasoning for choosing her as a presenter. Interestingly, the other team had an African American host and a male guest host, with a male producer feeding his presenters words like supple and snuggle.
The women sold 77 watches and made $2,998.38 in profit; the men sold 25 handbags and made $2,174.25 in profit. If you ask me, both of these men should be in the finals and not going home yet, but they made a critical mistake of choosing a product that was simply too expensive.
Not that the fact that the women won matters any because one of them will still be fired, bringing us down to a final two. Effectively, this was just a pointless task and a waste of time.
Steuart does not believe that Clint has a Metropolitan savviness to him, and might not do that well in New York. Juan agrees Steuart would fit in better than Clint with the Trump organization. Catherine, however, thinks Clint’s experience will be beneficial.
Clint accepts the blame for the price they chose, with the caveat that Steuart wanted to go even higher. I’m not sure to what extent it really matters because whatever price they chose, the product was going to be too high to be an impulse purchase. They would have been better off with the watch or the belt.
Steuart is fired. No explanation given. Since leaving the show, he has just gone back to running his business.
Now the women can head back into the boardroom…
Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another live recap of The Apprentice Season 10 Episode 12, which airs Thursday at 10/9c on NBC.