Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Office space
By Miss Alli | Season 3 | Episode 13 | Aired on 04.20.2005
Now, we are at Staples, where Magna is meeting with the executives. In person! No Space Communicators required! Tana interviews that not only could they find out as much as possible about Staples this way, but they could form a little bit of a relationship with the judges that might be useful later. Because if there's anyone who knows about building apparently harmless social relationships that she will later use against you, it's a cosmetics lady who comes to your house. Asked whether Staples has a slogan, Ms. Staples says that they do, and it happens to be, "That was easy." Which I think is a horrible slogan for a retail store that doesn't specialize in DIY projects, but all right. She says that their customers are people who just want a really easy way to shop for office supplies. So that's the "easy" part? The shopping? Sometimes I think I'm more qualified for this show than I think. I think their motto should be "Tape-N-Such." That would be awesome. I await my check, Staples! Anyway, she says that last year, the winner of their inventions contest was someone who brought them a padlock, except that instead of numbers, it used letters, so you could remember a word. Kendra explains that what they were told was that you don't need to invent something from scratch -- you should concentrate on improving something that's already out there. Welcome to today's accidental lesson in How Mark Burnett Got All That Damn Money.
Kendra and Tana wander in a Staples store, and they ask some shoppers about clutter and possible solutions. They meet up with one guy, who sort of looks like Les from WKRP in Cincinnati, who turns out to be an office manager shopping for supplies for a bunch of employees. They're struck by the fact that he has a whole bunch of what they persistently refer to as "stackables" in his cart. And...I'm not sure that's really the right word for those things, which appear to me to be top-loading, and therefore, by definition, not "stackable." They're stand-up, I think, and you wouldn't stack them, but "stackables" is the name Kendra and Tana assign to them, and I freely admit that my office supply identification superpowers are limited indeed, so...whatever. "Stackables" it is! As they go to interview another person for suggestions, we see that Craig is basically walking around the store on his own, paying no attention to the discussions they're having at all. Kendra says that she really doesn't have any idea what Craig was up to while she and Tana were working. She just knows he wasn't part of their market research. As we watch, Craig sits in an office chair and pushes a drawer closed, as if he's communing with the desk or something. Sarcastic Music Guy puts in some music that combines Honking Bassoons of What-The-Hell with a twinkly little noise like, "Aaahhhh." You can tell Sarcastic Music Guy kind of couldn't make heads or tails of what Craig was doing with that desk drawer either.
And now, we are with Net Worth, where Bren is asking Alex how exactly they can do a "focus group." Alex tells Bren to just find four office managers on the phone. Which is more "a series of random phone calls" than a "focus group." In fact, it appears notably lacking in both focus-like and group-like qualities. Bren starts looking through the yellow pages, apparently determined to rely on cold-calling, which is perhaps the dumbest idea ever. He sort of mocks the process in an interview, which it deserves, because he's chosen a stupid way to do it. Why not do something a little more rational, like start with calls to some temp agencies, who probably have a lot of contacts with office managers? If you could get one temp agency to hook you up with some contacts, then you would have somewhere to go besides cold-calling, because when you're asking for a favor? Cold-calling is the worst. I think Bren decided very early on that this was a stupid idea and didn't try very hard to make it work, because there were infinitely better ways to go about it, had he made any effort. You're going to ask to be the CEO of an organization, and you're left flummoxed by the instruction, "find any four office managers"? And visiting a Staples store, as Magna did, is only one of the ways they could have done it. Ultimately, Alex tells Bren to try to get at least two people to talk to him, and Bren says that "two people's a group," and then he laughs, which...just, really. It's not as if the idea of talking to people who are within your target market is some wacky scheme dreamed up in a lab by scientists with crazy hair and half-eaten tuna sandwiches in their pockets, zooming around on rocket-powered roller skates.