Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com