The thing that I have found that has tipped recently would be what I mentioned in class: compact fluorescent lightbulbs. It's funny, I have been telling people that come in to the store for years about the long life and energy efficiency of the compact fluorescents, yet nobody wanted to spend the $4-$7 per bulb. It took the media, the news specifically, to get people to realize the benefits of compact fluorescent bulbs. I think that it tipped because of the news stories that were on and I heard Oprah had something about it on. I think that news reporters, and possibly Oprah too fall under the category of mavens, or maybe salesmen, according to Gladwell. News reporters find out a lot of information and they relay it to the general public. This is why I see them as mavens. I happen to know someone that was kind of an innovator to this epidemic. A manager that used to work at my store has had all fluorescent bulbs in his house for a long time. When the epidemic tipped, which was last weekend, all the early and late majority started buying the bulbs. Last weekend, our store was almost completely wiped out of compact fluorescent bulbs. This is a good example of the law of the few. The few in this case are the mavenish newscasters.
The part of the book I found to be most interesting was the Law of the Few. Some examples that Gladwell gave were: "80 percent of the 'work' will be done by 20 percent of the participants, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes", and "20 percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents". At first I didn't remember ever hearing of this rule before and was interested in it. After some thought, I realized that just a couple weeks ago, in my finances class, we had a speaker in that talked about insurance. This speaker gave us that statistic. He told us that 20 percent of the population are in the majority of all accidents. I find it interesting how the theories of this book really relate to real life things. Gladwell uses so many real life examples. I also find the Law of the Few more interesting now that I have remembered a situation in my life where it has come up. I didn't know it as The law of the Few at the time, but I do now.