By: Nick Gambino
In the beginning, Uber was little more than an on-demand taxi service, but in recent years they’ve stretched their wings to cover other on-demand features, including a popular food delivery service (Uber Eats). They’ve even gone so far as to gobble up other popular services, like when they acquired competitor Postmates a few months back.
Now, the ride-sharing app is getting a bit more decadent than just cheeseburgers and milkshakes. They’ve just announced they are buying Drizly, an alcohol delivery platform, for a whopping $1.1 billion.
Drizly operates in more than 1,400 cities across the U.S., partnering up with local sellers much the way Uber Eats partners with local restaurants for food delivery. The deal isn’t done yet, but it’s expected to go through soon. After they finish the acquisition the idea is to incorporate the Drizly service into the Uber Eats app while also maintaining a standalone app. (Because you can never have enough redundant redundancies.)
“Wherever you want to go and whatever you need to get, our goal at Uber is to make people’s lives a little bit easier,” Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said in a press release. “That’s why we’ve been branching into new categories like groceries, prescriptions and, now, alcohol. Cory and his amazing team have built Drizly into an incredible success story, profitably growing gross bookings more than 300 percent year-over-year. By bringing Drizly into the Uber family, we can accelerate that trajectory by exposing Drizly to the Uber audience and expanding its geographic presence into our global footprint in the years ahead.”
If there’s ever a time for delivery to flourish it’s during a global pandemic. Deliveries have boomed at a time when we’re all sitting at home trying to minimize personal contact with the rest of the human race. While Uber’s original ride-hailing model has suffered as a result of the pandemic, thankfully, Uber Eats was there to bail them out by surging instead of plummeting.
After a successful restaurant delivery service and the recently added option of grocery delivery, delivering your favorite alcohol right to your home is the logical next step for Uber.
