The Donald Is All Fired Up

Talk about Reality-TV twists . . . and this one wasn’t even planned. Shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race throw in curve balls week after week in an attempt to surprise the audience, but it turns out that one of the biggest reality shockers in recent history came out of the blue this past Thursday on The Apprentice.

Lesson #1: Don’t ever embarrass Donald Trump.

Let’s see if I can even paint this picture. The task was for each team to create a promotional sporting event at two different Dick’s Sporting Goods locations. The object was to boost sales and the winning team was going to be measured by the percentage increase in the department’s average sales for the day. So the goal was not only to get people into the store, but to make them purchase goods. The Capital Edge team decided to do a golf promotion and went on to create a fairway (with different stations for different merchandise along the way) and a miniature golf expo for kids (which ended up allowing parents to be free to spend money). Almost all of Capital Edge’s team spent their time working over customers and converting onlookers to buyers. On the other side of the fence, the Excel team decided to use baseball as their sport of choice. They set up a beautiful baseball diamond right in the middle of the store and they planned to have a batting cage at home plate for kids to try out the equipment, with different sales stations at each of the bases. However, the batting cage took up the majority of the field when it was done being constructed and all of the stations were pushed off of the diamond and to whatever open space they could find. On top of that, the Excel team spent almost all of their time teaching the kids how to play baseball instead of trying to sell parents baseball merchandise. They put on a clinic instead of a sales event.

Lesson #2: Understand the task at hand.

So after refraining from throwing my remote through the television screen over how moronic the Excel team’s performance was, the teams got to the boardroom and finally the viewer gets vindication. The reports came in from Dick’s Sporting Goods about the difference in sales for the day for each team at their respective locations. Although Capital Edge had very little experience with the sport of golf, they managed to do a great job having their products available to the customers and converted a great deal of shoppers to customers. Their expo helped Dick’s to a 74% increase in average sales, something that even Trump was impressed by. Then there was Excel. Oh was there Excel. Not only did Excel obviously lose the task because of their lack of a sales strategy, but they not only failed to increase average sales for the day, they LOWERED it by 34%! They actually took away business from Dick’s with their little event. Haha. Too funny. They had tons and tons of people in the store because of their exhibition, but the customers spent all their time playing instead of buying. You could almost smell the steam coming from Trump’s ears when he heard the news. It was the most lopsided, embarrassing failure in all of the seasons of the shows existence.

Lesson #3: You get what you deserve in life.

So Trump sits with the pitiful Excel team in the boardroom. As they say, someone was going to be fired. But somehow, Rebecca and Marshawn are excused because they sold the most (though I don’t see how anyone could be considered a top seller with negative returns) and Brian is let off the hook because of his exemption from the week before. So that leaves project manager Josh, Jennifer (who I want to punch in the face every time she brags about her sales skills then sells less than a monkey with a stick could sell), James (who’s batting cage idea ruined the whole expo), and Mark (who spent all day pumping baseballs into the pitching machine). Let the bickering begin. Josh and Jennifer go at it for a while. Brian is just dumbfounded at how the batting cage idea failed. And Mark . . . well . . . Mark just should’ve realized that he could’ve done more than drop a baseball in a hole every 30 seconds, all day long. Trump and his right-hand peeps tear apart everyone and express how disgusting their performance was. Then Trump does his typical bouncing around from person to person as he explains to them how terrible they were on this task. But instead of landing on one final contestant to mutter his infamous “You’re Fired!”, he gets so fed up that he fires ALL four of them! Wow. Way to go man. Way to put your foot down. They all sucked, so why putz around? None of them deserved to be there any longer and The Donald doesn’t like to look bad, so he got rid of them all. See, you don’t need a written twist in a reality game show to make the jaws drop. Go Donald!

The contestants this season were supposed to be smarter. It was supposed to be a better season because the participants were supposed to be better. And while I might tend to agree that they may be better looking, they are still just as dense and it’s extremely frustrating to watch the pettiness, the bickering, the lack of cohesion between these teams. How hard is it to work with others? And am I the only one who wonders how these people became so successful in life when they can’t even handle a simple task when they are even GIVEN a team to work with? The leadership is just pathetic and the business decisions are just retarded. There’s no other way to explain it sometimes. Trump better hope that the last contestant standing in the end isn’t as moronic as the ones he has let go thus far this season.

SIDE NOTE: I loved seeing Carolyn Kepcher move into Trump’s boardroom chair when he was absent to introduce the task. She seemed to love it. I said way back in January of last year, back in my newspaper days, she is one of the best characters on TV.