What is wrong this jquey plugin?

What is wrong this jquey plugin?

I have a young jquery developer working on my wordpress sim only deals comparison plugin. The plugin is that is powered by jquery. I am unhappy about the fact that the plugin takes about a whole minute to load my sim only deals in IE8 while it loads all my deals in about 6 seconds in FF and chrome. In fact I would ideally like to make the whole thing much faster across all browsers but probably not possible.
 
I suspect that this IE8 issue is to do with how IE8 deals with my developers JS code. My developer says he doesnt know what the problem is. Please, please can someone have a look and tell me what they think? I would be happy to hear any constructive feedback about how to optimise the plugin. Here is my site: comparisim. Thanks so much.