Uber Shuts Down Drizly Booze Delivery Service

After taking the booze business under its wing for three years, Uber will be closing down Drizly, its dedicated alcohol delivery service, Axios reports. Uber first purchased Drizly in 2021 for $1.1 billion, and the service operates a bit differently from the rest of Uber's businesses.

Instead of using Uber drivers or contracting other delivery drivers to bring alcohol orders to customers, Drizly offers tech that allows liquor stores to make the deliveries using their own workers. Drizly operates with its own mobile app and website, but can also be accessed via the Uber Eats platform. As a distinct brand floating around the Uber portfolio, Drizly does seem slightly redundant for the tech behemoth, since Uber Eats also offers alcohol delivery.

"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, told Axios.

Drizly had a few challenges throughout its lifespan under the Uber umbrella. In 2020, Drizly found itself in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission after hackers exposed the personal information of 2.5 million customers. Though hackers can target just about any company, Drizly's misstep lay in the fact that it knew since 2018 about the vulnerability that led to the hack and did nothing to fix it in that time. This led the FTC to restrict the type of information Drizly was allowed to collect from its users, and the agency forced the brand to get rid of any unnecessary customer information it had stored. (Reminder: brands love to collect our personal data.)

Then in 2022, Drizly had to pay a $6 million settlement for failing to pay drivers tips and failing to pay sales tax from 2019 to 2022. Drizly also sought to branch out beyond alcohol delivery by exploring the possibility of delivering legal cannabis. The company tried to keep its announcement of a weed delivery service under wraps but a legal battle with its former CEO let the news slip to the public.

Before you panic about Drizly's demise, it's important to note Uber says it will continue to deliver alcohol via Uber Eats. Your party shots and emergency seltzer restocks are safe for now.