Did you read the same article I did? The author emailed instacart... He even pasted the full email correspondence. The representative did not accept responsibility for the email not making it to him ("I apologize if for some reason you did not receive it.") which we now know _was_ instacart's fault, and did not offer any refunds.
It took the public shaming before Apoorva showed up on the thread and offered his money back.
We know _now_ that it was Instacart's fault. The only fault I take with the email is the use of the word "if" instead of "that". Given a single case of an email not being received it's not unreasonable to assume it was caught in a spam filter.
As for refunds, sure, Instacart could have offered one, but honestly I don't think they should. As an Express member who was surprised by the delivery fee, there's no way I could have missed the fact that I was being charged one before I placed the order. The very dropdown you use to pick when you want the delivery also tells you what the fee will be. The fact that Caleb went ahead and placed the small orders that had a delivery fee is entirely his own fault.
And I also disagree that it required public shaming to be offered a refund on his express membership. He never asked for one in the first place. If he had responded to Mike and said that, given the changes to Express, he would prefer to have his membership cancelled, Instacart most likely would have gone ahead and done that for him.
I'll comment on this just to clarify a few things and we can agree to disagree, but these are just my thoughts:
1) I'll admit I didn't notice the fee being added because I don't schedule my deliveries for future times, I just select "Immediately" and go on with my day. I don't and shouldn't ever have to expect to read to the side to see a $7.99 fee being added because I paid $99 a year to have that fee removed. Sure, I could have noticed the total amount of the bill but I didn't.
2) I also didn't place significantly small orders ($10 minimum). I placed a few orders usually in the $25-$30 range that was enough ingredients for one or two nights dinner. Two of my orders in question were under this $35 limit but not a significant amount like you seem to have claimed as a fact.
3) I didn't want a refund for my express membership nor did I want a refund of the $7.99 delivery fees associated with those orders.. I wanted an answer on why I was receiving this fee after subscribing to Instacart Express. If I would have wanted either of those things I would have expressed them in the email or blog post.
The answer I got was basically that they changed the policy, charged my debit card, and it was unfortunate that I didn't receive an email.
This is just shady as can be. I went through their Twitter feed, their homepage, their blog, their terms and policies, and scanned all of my email accounts to see if I could possibly have missed the email or notification. There was nothing related to this policy change anywhere which I find wrong.
I felt that informing other users about this was beneficial. I'm was sure I wasn't the only one that it affected (two co-workers were affected, I learned of the second one after writing the post) and if I would not have posted this blog post I'm almost positive that Instacart would have paid no more attention to this nor informed the public that there could have been a mistake and informed them.
Internet Explorer cannot be removed without damaging Windows or affecting other programs which depend on Internet Explorer's files. You also said yourself it is "pre-installed".
You are not required to be a Google+ user in order to use Gmail, and you obviously won't see integrations in Gmail unless you have a Google+ account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader