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"Companies are not people; they do not have emotions; they do not participate in psychosocial guilt/submission demonstrations as a way to signal status transfer"

That is a grossly incorrect statement. Companies are built by people. As a founder of the start up who was involved in this screw up, I can tell you that we were very emotionally involved. And, we did feel the guilt.

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I didn't say that there aren't people in the process--but you shouldn't be letting emotions like righteous igdignation that someone didn't apologize enough dictate the decisions of a business if your goal is to make money. If you are running a company, either you're signing up to be one of those "economic rational actors" game theorists talk about, or you're signing up to fail.

No, but what you are looking for is an indication of future risk. By offering a full refund, Instacart demonstrated a strong commitment to making sure it never happens again by demonstrating that they would incur serious financial penalties upon themselves. Heroku, on the other hand, have made it impossible for me and others to determine whether they are victims of ignorant customers shooting themselves in the foot or whether those customers had a legitimate complaint. Sincere explanation or grin-fucking. The complaints against Heroku seem technically sound, but without me actually using Heroku, I'd never know. I am a potential Heroku customer. After that "apology", I have to add to my pros/cons list a risk that the complaints were valid. Had Heroku taken Instacart's direction, that risk would be mitigated.

" By offering a full refund"

They only singled out the 71 people and offered to refund them if customers reached out to instacart. If they were really committed to making customers whole, they would proactively refund the charges and refund the fee (and then ask the customers if they would like to continue with the service).

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