Scoop: Uber shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly

(L/A)
Uber has decided to shutter Drizly, an alcohol delivery service it bought three years ago for $1.1 billion, Axios has learned.
The big picture: Drizly was always a bit of an odd match for Uber, in that it didn't hire or contract its own delivery workers. Instead, Drizly provided backend tech that let local liquor stores provide their own deliveries.

• The bigger issue, however, might have been cybersecurity. Drizly in 2020 confirmed a hack that exposed information on around 2.5 million customers.
• What it didn't say, however, was that the company had been aware of the security flaw for two years without fixing it.
• That information was discovered by the Federal Trade Commission, after Uber's acquisition of Drizly, and led to an FTC order that restricted the types of customer information that Drizly could collect and retain.

What they're saying: "After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we've decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — all on a single app," Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber's SVP of delivery, tells Axios exclusively.

• He adds: "We're grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer."

 

[neverendingmidi]

Are you saying that research was worth a billion dollars?

When you have investors throwing money at you like a 200psi firehose, why not? Buy up competition and get their data.

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

US has fucktarded booze laws

Alcohol laws in the US are by state, making any nationwide alcohol business a complicated mess. In Illinois and Washington, you can get your vodka, whiskey, and absinthe at the grocery store. Liquor stores still exist in those states to sell really obscure stuff, I could get the old "Soviet Champagne" brand, some Georgian, Moldovan, and Serbian wines, and Rakia in both states. In Maryland, grocery stores can't sell any alcohol, you have to get your beer at a liquor store. Colorado was really weird, my first trip to the grocery store, I picked up a local "IPA" and when I drank it at home, found it pretty weak, and saw it had only 3% ABV. If you want a real one, you have to go to the liquor store.

 

[Not a bee]

I picked up a 45% liquor not too long ago from Drizly.
Only time I used the app though. In the state I live in you mostly have to go and pick it up at the store unless you order from Wine.com or something like that.

 

[Snekposter]

In Texas, grocery stores can't sell hard liquor (beer & wine only), but you can hardly find a grocery store that doesn't have a liquor store within the same shopping center.

Shit, in Florida the grocery store will often have a liquor store right next door, and even owned by the same company.

 

[Glowing In The Streets]

Laws aside, Considering they have their own couriers, why dont they use them?
Honestly, i think this circus was intended to blow up the competition

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Shit, in Florida the grocery store will often have a liquor store right next door, and even owned by the same company.

That would've been the case in Texas but I believe that to protect small businesses no publicly traded companies allowed.

H-E-B and Randalls had religious founders, and Safeway, Albertsons, and Kroger all were publicly traded. The only one that does it is/was Fiesta back when they weren't exclusively a Hispanic retailer.

Publix has liquor stores, both in their built stores and the ones they inherited from Albertsons.

 

[Begemot]

Alcohol laws in the US are by state, making any nationwide alcohol business a complicated mess. In Illinois and Washington, you can get your vodka, whiskey, and absinthe at the grocery store. Liquor stores still exist in those states to sell really obscure stuff, I could get the old "Soviet Champagne" brand, some Georgian, Moldovan, and Serbian wines, and Rakia in both states. In Maryland, grocery stores can't sell any alcohol, you have to get your beer at a liquor store. Colorado was really weird, my first trip to the grocery store, I picked up a local "IPA" and when I drank it at home, found it pretty weak, and saw it had only 3% ABV. If you want a real one, you have to go to the liquor store.

Is an IPA with that ABV even drinkable?

 

[Marvin]

In Maryland, grocery stores can't sell any alcohol, you have to get your beer at a liquor store.

Not to shit on you. This is county specific.

I live in Baltimore City (different county from Baltimore County).

All the counties around Baltimore city or Baltimore County are super liberal with booze laws

I go to Virginia to troll Chris Chan (while wearing a pickle suit), I'm blown away seeing beers in CVS. This is bonkers for a Marylander.

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

Not to shit on you. This is county specific.

I live in Baltimore City (different county from Baltimore County).

All the counties around Baltimore city or Baltimore County are super liberal with booze laws

I go to Virginia to troll Chris Chan (while wearing a pickle suit), I'm blown away seeing beers in CVS. This is bonkers for a Marylander.

For some time I was one of the few white people left in Prince George's, so it's based on that. I forgot how weird that state is with its counties. So many things that are handled by the city everywhere else I've lived seemed to be county responsibilities. That probably makes sense in a place where you can have a single family every mile, but in a place where counties are around a million people with a few > 10,000 population cities in them, it must be a nightmare to manage. The people of Prince George's certainly can't handle it.

 

[Bored & Confused]

I used it a few times during the kung-flu lockdowns when I got laid off. I never left the house. Not because of the coof, but because fuck people in a panic. I got really into making cocktails then. It was comfy; watching people from around the world collectively loose their marbles while sipping on a delicious frozen tiki drink. The thought that I could just get drunk as Hell at ten in the morning on a weekday was relentlessly funny to me, too. Then the lockdowns lifted & I got my job back, so I knocked that shit off.

I tried using them again a year later & they no longer delivered to my area (I guess it had something to do with uber buying them), so I didn't bother using the site again.