Uber shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly | Hacker News Reader

Uber shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly

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27 pointssseagull24 comments

I used Drizly exclusively to see where alcohol I wanted was available and then drove there. It was surprisingly useful for that.

FWIW, I recall Prime Now was geared towards making money back via "on-demand" alcohol sales. Drizly was one of the competitors in the market.

In a similar fashion, and as per how Amazon likes to operate, the functionality of Prime Now was then assimilated into Amazon.com itself.

Huh. I guess no one really wanted alcohol delivery... or at least was willing to pay a considerable surcharge to have things brought to them.

But is that true? Or did Uber just buy it up to remove another competitor that might expand into delivering other things besides booze?

Let's not kid ourselves, these features will be rolled into Uber "Eats" soon if they haven't been already. The only thing shutting down is the overhead of running another brand on top of the Uber platform.

No idea. You're probably right.

I do wonder, though, how far the average American is from a place where she can buy alcohol. At least where I am, every gas station has a pretty solid selection of beers and whatnot. Have we already reached optimal convenience?

Massachusetts has some pretty weird laws surrounding alcohol. I've seen it in the occasional gas station, grocery store, or convenience store but for the most part here if you're looking to buy alcohol you're going to a store that specializes in that.

A funny Massachusetts crazy laws story. When Apple Computer IPO'ed in the early 1980s, Massachusetts residents were not allowed to own the stock. Like it was actually illegal for them to buy this stock. The reason was that Massachusetts runs its own state-level version of the SEC, and the Massachusetts regulators felt that Apple stock was too risky to be made available to ordinary retail investors. This situation persisted for several months before the Massachusetts regulators finally backed down.

As everyone knows, Apple went on to become one of the best (maybe the best?) stock market investments a person in 1980 could possibly have made.

Could be next door, could be 30 miles away.

State laws around alcohol are strange.

I’ve never ordered alcohol from Drizly or Uber Eats but if I was 5 drinks deep, didn’t want to walk somewhere, and shouldn’t be driving then I can definitely see the appeal.

I used drizly often for presents, especially for out of town people. Never once for myself actually.

They are still run Postmates on top of Uber Eats, seemingly to appeal to younger audience. Not sure how much longer that will last.

I sometimes get alcohol from Uber… but I just use Uber eats. Not sure what drizly is.

Nah, it went more like this:

1. UberEats didn’t offer alcohol delivery, Drizly did (back in like 2016).

2. Uber acquires Drizly in 2021.

3. UberEats adds alcohol delivery (not sure whether step 2 or 3 happened first, but that’s beside the point).

4. At some point after the acquisition, even if you ordered through Drizly, the final order tracking goes through UberEats. I.e., regardless of which app you use for the order, the tracking link you get through a text to your phone number leads to UberEats tracking. Same with customer service. For both UberEats and Drizly.

5. [where we are at right now] Uber shuts down Drizly.

Makes perfect sense to me, as all the functionality of Drizly got merged and integrated into UberEats, so there is zero reason to use Drizly now. I stopped using it about half a year ago and switched to UberEats for alcohol delivery, because using Drizly felt like using some intermediary in-between app that gets routed to UberEats in the end anyway.

yay, acquisition, consolidation, monopolization, yay

It's not monopolization when you can just buy the alcohol yourself or (in AU/NZ) the supermarkets themselves do alcohol delivery. I'd be surprised if more than 1% of all alcohol is delivered by Uber. To use monopolization like this is to strip it of all meaning.

> monopolization

Afaik any food delivery app can also deliver alcohol these days, so I am not sure what the whole monopolization hubbub is.

And for all it’s worth, it is much easier dealing with UberEats or Doordash customer service than it used to be with all the fragmented separate small apps. So as a customer, it definitely feels like a win.

nit: UberEats actually got alcohol delivery as part of the Postmates acquisition in 2020 IIRC.

Disclaimer: Worked at Postmates at the time of acquisition, we definitely did alcohol.

Oh nice, I genuinely had no idea. When did Postmates add alcohol delivery?

Not trying to nitpick your point, asking out of genuine curiosity. Because the only reason I even started using Drizly was due to them being the only game in town for alcohol delivery circa 2016 iirc. And after good experiences with them, I didn’t really bother checking out the competitors. But it would make sense that Postmates would expand into that area as well.

I think around ~2017?

However at that point it would have just been LA and SF, Postmates usually did staged rollout of stuff like that and I don't think we did significant alcohol deliveries until ~2019 or so.

daiquiri delivery disagrees

Maybe there were some legal challenges with the delivery person doing age checks?

The age check is actually a legal requirement - the bigger challenge was actually getting the delivery person to consistently do it!

Oh yeah but I mean the delivery guys are often underage themselves. It might present a legal issue. And indeed, they don't tend to be too precise, especially if you just hand them a nice tip :) Much less likely to happen in a physical store or bar.

So I could imagine the local law enforcement wouldn't have too much confidence in the process, that's what I meant :)

My brother used it to keep getting alcohol while he was home bound due to complications from diabetes. He was able to hide his consumption from us during the last few months of his life because Drizly delivered for him.

I'm not attacking them or anything, I'm sure there are people out there who are home bound who love to get a bit of a tipple now and then for whom such a service is wonderful. It just wasn't in my family's case.

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