Ben Roy

I love it when life comes along and illustrates something for you in a completely unexpected way. Take my shopping trip the other day at Costco.

We were browsing through the produce section and saw boxes of plums. These plums looked great - nice color, no real blemishes, very uniform. There was one problem though in that they were HUGE. They had to be double the size of what you normally think of when it comes to plums.

I have a bias that oversized fruit tends to be less tasty than it's more normal-sized brethren. I don't know exactly where that came from or whether it's accurate, but we were discussing whether we wanted to risk buying a warehouse-store-size container of extra large plums.

That's when life showed up. A woman standing near us turned and said, "Those are the best plums I've ever tasted. I buy some every week when I go shopping." We looked at each other, shrugged, and put them in our basket.

As we walked away I had to laugh at the perfect illustration of social recommendations. The person who's advice turned us from lookers into buyers was completely unknown to us and yet it carried so much more weight than any other factor.

It's a poignant reminder of how important the opinions of vocal users can be, and also clearly the justification for the recent changes by the FTC to rules surrounding endorsements.