Uber declared that it’s purchasing alcohol delivery service Drizly in a settlement worth $1.1 billion, as the uber company proceeds to make out its stable of food and different delivery services.
The ultimate intention is for Drizly’s marketplace of beer, wine, and liquor to be combined into the current Uber Eats application, giving Uber users a one-stop-shop for both food and drink deliveries. The existing Drizly app will hold around, though.
Drizly is an online delivery for being local liquor stores. The company associates with local sellers and then assigns delivery drivers related to Uber Eats service to handle the delivery. The service is now open in over 1,400 cities across the United States.
This deal signals the most advanced delivery-focused progress on Uber’s part in recent months, even as it’s started to sell off the few profitable parts of its business. Last year, Uber sold off its autonomous vehicle and flying taxi shares as it sought to be extra profitable.
Those movements followed Uber’s failed effort to purchase GrubHub last year, along with a successful recovery of Postmates over the summer for $2.65 billion.
Uber also began to move into on-demand grocery delivery, starting in Latin America and Canada and increased its Uber Health service to add prescription delivery. The addition of Drizly fits easily into the expanding delivery-focused strategy for Uber.
It’s a plan that performs sense. While futuristic projects like self-driving cars or on-demand flying taxis sound cool on paper, it has not resulted in exceptionally profitable products.
And in a bruising 2020 that marked Uber post-experience losses as travel plummeted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, delivery services stopped a bright spot on Uber’s ledger, increasing massively, thanks to a related COVID-induced spike in customers needing to order in more extra.
Prominently, these specific new delivery services are all businesses that rely on contract workers.
Uber recently spent millions of dollars as part of a lobbying campaign in California to evade filing those workers as employees through Prop 22. (A group of Uber and Lyft drivers is currently suing, alleging that it “illegally” excludes drivers from California’s workers’ compensation program.)
That’s in contrast to the company’s parts that Uber is turning down, like the autonomous vehicle program, which relied on full-time employees.
