I'm disappointed in this post. A person has every right to be upset about a situation like the one the author describes but to frame it like the company is doing something wrong and quitting in protest is a bit childish to me.
Okay, they changed the policy. Companies do that all the time and as much as we don't like it, most often they need to so they can either continue to be profitable or just to continue providing their service. This seems like such a case. (Imagine Instacart's yearly customers ordering a banana from the grocery store and not paying any shipping fee - this was probably done to prevent abuse).It's disappointing but not out of line.
They sent out a notice. One person and their two friends didn't get the memo. That's truly unfortunate but then to wonder out loud if an email ever got sent out at all is another point against the author. The insinuation is that the company is lying.
This genre of blog post has gotten out of hand. It was once reserved for truly egregious acts. Now every time someone falls into an obvious edge-case they blow the whole thing out of proportion.
The bottom line here is that the company had to change their policy, they sent out notice of that and the author is framing them as the bad guys because he didn't get the memo. It's okay and understandable to be disappointed by being charged for something you thought you wouldn't be charged for but nothing underhanded happened here so it's not alright to frame Instacart as the villain.
Changing the terms of a contract after it's been signed is shady, and it's totally fair-game to publicly call out a company that does it, especially since the OP contacted Instacart first to make sure it wasn't a mistake.
I'm friends with one of the founders of Instacast and I'd love to see them win, but the way they handled this is really not OK.
As a consumer, do you ever worry about whether Amazon is making a profit on EC2 or Prime? I don't. But I sign up for something, and I expect to either have my agreement honored, cancelled, or mutually replaced with my consent. If that didn't happen, there is _absolutely no way_ that I would continue doing business with the company, especially for something as discretionary as what Instacart offers.
I'm surprised the author was able to maintain such a civil tone, not that he posted about it.
Even Instacarts CEO's post on this thread is more apologetic than yours.
A significant chunk of customer service and sales people tell what I'm sure they think are "white lies", all the time.
Imagine a hypothetical irate, unreasonable customer who will go away happy if you say the right thing.
As for this particular case, perhaps they sent this notification mail through a different process than the one that allows all the other mails to get through spam filters etc, but it's entirely reasonable to suspect this kind of "oops! don't be angry at us" lie.
Okay, they changed the policy. Companies do that all the time and as much as we don't like it, most often they need to so they can either continue to be profitable or just to continue providing their service. This seems like such a case. (Imagine Instacart's yearly customers ordering a banana from the grocery store and not paying any shipping fee - this was probably done to prevent abuse).It's disappointing but not out of line.
They sent out a notice. One person and their two friends didn't get the memo. That's truly unfortunate but then to wonder out loud if an email ever got sent out at all is another point against the author. The insinuation is that the company is lying.
This genre of blog post has gotten out of hand. It was once reserved for truly egregious acts. Now every time someone falls into an obvious edge-case they blow the whole thing out of proportion.
The bottom line here is that the company had to change their policy, they sent out notice of that and the author is framing them as the bad guys because he didn't get the memo. It's okay and understandable to be disappointed by being charged for something you thought you wouldn't be charged for but nothing underhanded happened here so it's not alright to frame Instacart as the villain.