Wait, so you knew about the 71 emails not being sent and did nothing? Also, I find it hard to believe it was only 71 emails because of the number of complaints I saw in the original thread, unless the majority of your customers are HN members.
What happened is that we made a mistake querying for the email addresses, causing us to miss a group of the first people to sign up for Instacart Express. This skewed heavily towards HN members. We knew a few people had been missed (because they emailed us after seeing the charge, and said they didn't get an email) but not why or how many.
I am checking out instacart, and a popup is being thrown on my face to register/login without the option to dismiss it! Seriously, WTH? This is beyond bad design, when your design is to extort the emails registration out the users. Not impressed.
I was in QA at a retail company. It's hard to do targeted notifications and updates. You miss one condition in a WHERE clause when defining your target and something like this happens. It is also fairly easy to figure out the size of the group you missed from a single example.
That's a cute response, but that's not how applications are written and presumably you know that.
I'm not excusing this. If they did it the right way they'd have
1. Set a date to cancel the existing program
2. Sent a targeted email to everyone enrolled in it which said, "We have major changes to the unlimited delivery plan effective xx/yy, if you would like to continue please follow this link and accept the changes or you will be opted out"
3. Cancel the old plans across the board on date xx/yy
But hindsight's 20/20, their explanation is more that plausible, and their response is more than adequate. Do they need to put on hairshirts and scourge themselves?
