Episode 8: Ice Escapades

Welcome. Before I start the episode, my big question this week is when will Omarosa be fired? Or is she somehow able to trick Trump into respecting her, despite the fact that she does absolutely nothing to help her teammates in these challenges? Does she win the season? Obviously Omarosa and Donald have a strong relationship today. I find it hard to believe that her arrogance won't catch up to her eventually though.

Everyone seems happy that Tammy is gone, as Heidi and Omarosa walk back into the suite.

Heidi is going to be the project manager for Protege. She looks very sad. Don't forget, her mother is in the hospital.

Heidi lets her feelings about Omarosa loose in a little sidebar. She must have been frustrated having to hide it in the boardroom. She says, “When there's a task, her head hurts.” The show replays Omarosa getting hit in the head by the “piece of concrete,” and just like last time, I still don't actually see anything hit her head.

They have to be at Trump Tower at 8:45. Wait, aren't they in Trump Tower? My head is spinning.

We can't get off Omarosa's headaches. Says O, “I think I've been a trooper throughout this situation.”

They all go to the front of Trump Tower and a giant truck labeled “Trump Ice” pulls up in front, honking wildly, and Trump runs out. Is Donald getting into malt liquor?

He gets in front of them, and delivers a classic Trump speech. “I've had a fascination for a long time with branding. And I've decided to open up a water distribution company.” Of course Trump wants to get into the water business. Water is basically free for people in the USA. If you can bottle it and ship it and fool people into paying two dollars for a bottle, then you make a huge profit. Trump lives for this kind of lowbrow rip-off shit. And don't even get me started on the lack of sustainability and the profiteering off of a basic human right.

Trump also calls it, “The purest, best tasting water you could imagine.” Somehow I think that might be the biggest lie he's ever told.

Why is it called Trump Ice? It's literally water. This is the dumbest thing.

The teams are going to be put to the task of selling his water. The winner will just sell more water. Sounds like a simple task.

Ereka is the project manager for VersaCorp. We really haven't heard much from her since the big Omarosa fight. Things cooled off once she left O's team, but we do have to remember that she is a hothead. Ereka might be in trouble if her team doesn't do well.

Bill discusses the idea of motivating people to buy more water by giving them an incentive. Like buy six months of water, get the seventh free. Ereka and Katrina completely ignore him. They tell him to start making calls instead and to leave the strategy to them.

Bill and Ereka go to a bunch of restaurants in Manhattan. They're trying to “create a buzz” about this bottled water. At least, that's what Ereka says to every restaurant owner they approach. Bill is furious. Rather than trying to create some kind of artificial “buzz” with the limited amount of time they have to sell this water, they should be going into these restaurants and getting out with sales. After several complete failures, he drops some numbers onto a sandwich shop owner. The owner immediately buys two pallets. Maybe Bill is on to something here.

Trump Black Screen Moment. Beggars Can't Be Choosers. “Never beg when you're trying to sell something. If it doesn't work out, take your lumps, and relax. But you'll never sell through the begging route.” Short, but sweet. And also inane.

Just like VersaCorp, Protege are going to some restaurants and negotiating with their owners. Troy is going hard trying to sell them all on pallets of bottles. The problem they continue to run into is that NYC restaurants don't have the storage space for seventy-two cases of water.

Amy and Omarosa were put together by Heidi because Heidi knows Amy can handle Omarosa. And she really can. She told Omarosa ahead of time that if she needed to stop talking, Amy would kick her under the table. In their first meeting, there was a lot of kicking. It's working. At least for now.

Amy talked numbers. Omarosa talked marketing. At this meeting, the most ridiculous thing happened. O had a table full of all these fancy mineral waters, like Perrier and San Pellegrino, yet somehow was able to say with a straight face that Trump Ice was better than all of them. I haven't told you this yet, but the Trump Ice is in a dinky little plastic bottle. Like the kind of bottle you get the convenience store brand's bottled water in. Not even a Poland Spring or a Deer Park. There is no way this is the correct approach to get a sale.

The restaurant owners do not seem impressed. The issue of storage again comes up. Omarosa asks if they would be willing to buy five cases. They say yes. However, remember that Amy was supposed to talk money and Omarosa was supposed to do marketing. She is very upset that they just expended all of this effort to make a seventy-five dollar sale.

Once Protege gets back to the suite, Amy makes it clear to Heidi that she does not want to work for Omarosa any more. Omarosa is “begging” (call back to black screen?) for sales when she walks into these places. One restaurant only bought one case from them because they weren't interested and O said “how about one case?” One case is only fifteen dollars. Amy considers that to be a waste of time. Troy agrees. He was hoping to sell 1500 cases and they're never going to get there one at a time. As night falls, it sounds like their plan is to leave Omarosa in the suite while the rest of the team goes out and makes the deals. If true, this would be amazing.

Okay, now for some reason Omarosa and Kwame are at a salon. Omarosa gets her makeup done and sells them two cases of water. This is weird.

Troy, Heidi, and Amy are in a cab uptown when Troy decides that he's going to set up the purchase order for the next client so that they get “twenty cases a week.” He figures this is the only way to actually sell anything close to a pallet to these storage-starved customers in NYC.

The first client agrees to twenty cases a week. The second client gets negotiated up to five pallets a week by Troy. That's really absurd. Amy is very impressed by his negotiations. She says he's way smarter than she had previously given him credit for. He reads people well.

Nick and Katrina are in a cab. Nick is so excited. He said sales are what he lives for. He walks straight into this warehouse and says he wants to sell them a whole truck of the Trump Ice. The person doesn't respond. Nick starts consulting his spreadsheet of numbers. Katrina says that if you show the potential buyer that you care more about the numbers than about them, you won't be able to close the deal. And she's right. He says no. Hopefully Nick can clean up his act a little bit as he goes on. Remember, he is my favorite.

“It's not rocket science, it's just water,” says the next potential buyer to Nick, Katrina and Bill. Their pitch was getting a little too sophisticated. In my opinion, they need to emphasize two things more. They need to emphasize the price savings they can offer, and they need to work harder at getting to know the people they are trying to sell to. They're taking this very sterile approach that isn't working at all.

They're back in the suite, and it is revealed that Nick did not fill out the paperwork correctly to process the sales. Ereka is very mad. She is freaking out right in front of Carolyn. That is probably not good.

There's fourteen hours left until the winner is revealed. Troy and Kwame go to the gym. Everyone else goes to the club. Nick and Amy are reconnecting. Everyone is having a ball.

The next day begins and the teams enter the boardroom. Protege did “very well,” according to George. They did over six thousand dollars in sales. He goes on to say that VersaCorp “did not do as well.” They sold a little bit over four thousand dollars.

Ereka responds that they did everything they could do.

George says that Protege made a difference by selling some water to distributors. That was more than half their sales. That must explain the five pallet a week customer.

Their boardroom meeting is interrupted by loud drilling from downstairs. It is a new tenant in Trump Tower that's doing renovations. Trump tells them to stop. It's supposed to be comic relief, I guess, but it's not funny. I didn't even think about laughing. This show needs better writers.

Heidi, as project manager of the winning team, gets to select two people to go with her on a private helicopter tour of Manhattan in Trump's helicopter. This seems like a prize which is very intentionally set up to cause inter-team drama. Let me guess – she isn't going to choose Omarosa and will instead choose the other two members of her team.

She picks Troy and Amy. Obviously.

We go back to the suite. Heidi is on the phone with her mom. She is telling her mom that she's dedicating this win to her. It's very cute.

Mr. Trump is not with them in the helicopter, which I found to be surprising. We, the viewer, are treated to many wide shots of Manhattan which were certainly not taken from this specific helicopter ride. Troy is so amused by everything they see. Little thirty-two year old boy from Idaho. He calls the Statue of Liberty the most beautiful woman in America, next to his mother.

VersaCorp is intently negotiating what will happen in the boardroom. Ereka is trying to get Bill to be on her side in the boardroom. The problem is that Bill felt like last time he was on her side, she totally flipped in front of Trump. He says he can't trust her.

VersaCorp goes to the boardroom. Trump asks what happened. Ereka said “we lost by two-thousand dollars.” Trump, in a clearly overdubbed voice, says, “That's a very large percentage.”

Ereka explains they did very well with bars and restaurants. They failed at hooking up with any distributors.

Trump asks Nick how he feels. He says he feels terrible and he's sick of losing.

Carolyn interjects, saying that all four of them failed.

George says he's surprised at how little all four of them have learned. He's very frustrated that none of the people in the boardroom have learned how to get close to their customers.

Ereka says she told Nick to learn about the warehouse and its owners before he went in there. She says he didn't do what she asked. Nick asks how she could know that. She wasn't there at the warehouse. However, Katrina was there. Nick goes on to say that he reviewed the website. George says that Nick clearly never attempted to warm up to the customer. Nick says he doesn't have to because of his warmth and energy.

Nick then vents about how Ereka was frazzled in front of everyone. A leader should never do that, he says.

This is a brutal boardroom meeting. There's only four people left on this team and they are all just shouting at each other. Trump insists that Ereka and Katrina are best friends, for some reason, and that he knows that Ereka won't pick Katrina to be in the bottom three. He is correct. She picks the two boys.

I have a feeling that Ereka is going to get canned. She is far too emotional for Trump. He doesn't like that. He wants someone who will just listen to him and does what he says.

Nick comes back into the boardroom guns blazing. He immediately starts speaking before he sits down and says he's always going full-throttle out there. It's only a coincidence that he's lost six times, apparently. Ereka starts talking too, and Trump immediately lashes into Bill, saying that he sees right through his game of keeping quiet while the emotional people argue it out. This is going to be good.

Trump then asks Bill who he would choose to be fired. Bill doesn't want to say. George gangs up on him. Finally Bill lets it out that he was mad that Ereka wasn't listening to any of his ideas early on. However, he keeps waffling and won't commit to saying “Ereka” until George pulls the words out of his mouth.

Bill says that Ereka and he did most of the sales. Nick didn't do much. So now Trump is trying to figure out the alliances and get to the truth of what is happening.

Especially the Katrina/Ereka alliance. Ereka reveals that she didn't bring Katrina into the boardroom because Katrina didn't “take a leadership role.” She also “brought in the most dollars.” Carolyn interrupts, she did, or she and Nick did? Remember, Nick and Katrina were traveling together, doing sales. Even though Nick seems to have struggled, it is clear that when they made a sale, both Katrina and Nick were equally involved. There is definitely some bias on the part of Ereka here.

Trump pretty much immediately fires Ereka, without much more thought.