The Apprentice 2, Episode 5 Saturday Boardroom Footage: Liar, Liar!

It might seem logical that the additional Yahoo footage of The Apprentice would match the additional footage shown in the Saturday episode. Alas, ‘tis not the case. Saturday’s episode, subtitled “The Boardroom,” focuses on – you guessed it – the Boardroom. The tasks and everything else are condensed to less than 20 minutes. This leaves much more time for sniping and arguing, not to mention a little character development.

Betsy has already covered most of what happens either in her recap of Thursday’s episode or her recap of the Yahoo material. However, that still leaves Saturday night (and if you haven’t read the Yahoo recap, I encourage you to do so, because it contains additional information that isn’t in Saturday’s episode either and thus will not be covered here). Let’s take a look at what happens in the Boardroom.

As the discussion of the price progresses from what we saw on the air and on Yahoo, Pamela insists that there is “no way” the seven dollar difference in price on the It Works! cleaning blocks would have caused somebody to pick up the phone and call. Carolyn, who has already expressed her feelings that the price was far too high, notes that it’s a disposable product. Pamela says if they had lowered the price that much, they would have had to sell 30% more blocks than they had. Ivana interrupts and says no, they would have had to sell 8% more because they sold 22% of their inventory and would have had to move 30% of the inventory if they had priced it at $19.99. Um, Ivana, I hate to take Pamela’s side, but she’s right. They would have had to sell 30% more than they did, not 30% more of the overall inventory. However, it appears nobody else at the table catches this error, and Trump even compliments her for getting better with numbers.

Nevertheless, maybe they would have sold 30% more with the lower price. It seems completely unfathomable to Pamela, but when she and the Mosaic team returned to QVC this past Monday to sell their respective products, It Works! at the lower price determined by QVC far outsold the panini grill.

After what we saw on the discussion of pricing, it continues with pretty much all the other women saying that they believed the product was priced too high. Carolyn says she thought it was too high and George thought it was too high. Trump says that QVC thought it was much too high! (As we saw when Pamela returned to QVC on Monday, as mentioned above, to sell the bars again. They were priced ten dollars lower.)

As we saw on Yahoo, Trump asks Ivana what she thinks of Pamela’s leadership. After Ivana’s answer, Trump asks her how she handles pressure. Ivana thinks she handles it quite well and stays calm and collected. Trump says she wasn’t calm last week and she wasn’t calm the week before – certainly not when Bradford was fired. She says she’s calm during the task, but when Bradford was fired, she was upset that he was taken away. (Um, then why did you bring him into the Boardroom?) She reiterates that during a task she is calm and working, not fighting or anything like that.

George asks if she was accountable for the script, and she says she was. So he asks what was in the script to make a man want to buy the product. Also, they had already mentioned that a lot of the audience is older and don’t have kids anymore (so they don’t worry about getting crayon on the wall). Ivana says she had a priority list for the demos and a production change altered that priority list. One particular demo she had was for getting paint off, which both men and women have to do. Good answer, Ivana! Now that is staying cool under fire.

Later, George asks Jennifer if she thought Pamela was a good leader and Jennifer tries to avoid answering. George repeats and she says she didn’t feel Pamela was a good leader in the sense that the group did not feel comfortable with the pricing issue. George still isn’t happy with her hedging and tells her it really is an easy question to answer, “yes or no.” She finally says, “No.”