Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Water, water, everywhere, and yet it costs a lot
By Miss Alli | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 02.25.2004
At the next place, we see Amy discussing pallet prices. Suddenly, Assorama offers "a couple of cases." Then, we see Assorama promising again not to do numbers ever again -- but this is clearly out of sequence, because Amy's hair is up at the first place and down at the second place, and it's up again during this clip, so I think this purported second conversation about not doing numbers actually is just an extension of the conversation from right after the restaurant. But the point remains the same -- Amy has clearly told Assorama to knock it off a couple of times now. Next, they head for a third place. Wait...Amy's hair is back up, so maybe I'm wrong. I am thinking too hard. Anyway, she starts to try to convince them to make a commitment, and Assorama jumps in and offers to sell them...one case. One. Case. They probably spent twice that much in taxi fare just to get where they were going. Amy interviews that she was astonished. "I was like, 'Holy shit. Surely I am not hearing this again!' That was when she got her third kick." Assorama laughs in an interview about Amy kicking her under the table. "She's lucky I didn't kick her ass back," she chortles with unwarranted confidence. Amy explains in her interview that she finds it an embarrassing waste of time to walk out of a meeting having sold fifteen dollars worth of water. Yeah, no kidding. "We are a damn good team together," Assorama says on their way out of the restaurant, demonstrating that in addition to a complete inability to read customers, she has a complete inability to read Amy. I mean, I guess if you ever need anyone to sell one can of Dr. Pepper on your behalf, Assorama may be your girl, but I have yet to see the slightest evidence that she has any business sense whatsoever. Or any regular sense, either.
That night, Protégé gets together to gather their numbers. Troy voices over that he was worried about the numbers, because he figured they needed to shoot for 1500 cases or so, and they weren't looking like they were going to get there. To wit, we see Assorama reading off the totals from some of the places they sold to. Five cases...fifteen cases...zero...yeah. That's not getting you toward 1500. Amy talks about the fact that they have an 8:00 AM appointment at a place called "Value in Volume," which appears to be a distributor. Maybe Assorama can get them to buy a bottle. Heidi interviews that she, Troy, and Amy are going to do the selling, because Amy can't stand Assorama anymore. Hee. And as for Assorama, Heidi says she "can't sell herself out of a paper bag." And if anyone would know about selling yourself out of a paper bag...well, never mind. You get the picture.
At 2:45 AM, Ereka is on the computer and Nick is awake at the desk behind her. They discuss the fact that he's meeting with "ABC Distribution" at 10:00 AM. It took some poking around, but they're actually talking about ABC Office Essentials, a company that provides food and beverages and a bunch of other stuff to offices. I have to say, I checked out their site myself, and I failed to find a "yooge" quantity of extremely useful information, and it did take me about five minutes to read the whole thing. But anyway, Ereka asks Nick to read the site, and he doesn't want to. She says, "Are you telling me you don't try to understand your customer?" "Do you really want to enter into a discussion like this for twenty minutes about theories in sales?" Oh, God, no. Please. "Theories in sales"? That is the cocktail party of my nightmares. She says no, no theories, she just wants him to look at the site. He doesn't want to. "She's trying to tell me how to sell!" he says in disbelief in an interview. "It's absurd! It's like trying to tell the Pope how to pray!" That's right, you know. Nick is the spiritual leader of all the world's salespeople, and every year on Memorial Day, the highest of sales holy days, they gather in the city of his birth to hear him make an address from a high balcony. Nick goes off to bed, leaving Ereka high and dry and devoid of religious instruction.