Drizly

» see drizly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The idea arrived late on the evening of 1 March 2012 in Ignacio Hall, a Boston College dorm, which is the kind of detail that only gets written down once the company has sold for a billion dollars. Nick Rellas wanted beer delivered. His classmates Justin Robinson and Spencer Frazier built it with him, and Frazier wired in the part that made it legal: software that scanned the customer's ID at the door before the bag changed hands. Drizly itself owned no stock. It took the order and passed it to a licensed store nearby, which is how it grew without a warehouse.

Deliveries started in Boston in 2013 and moved on to New York and Chicago. By the start of 2021 the app reached more than 1,400 cities in North America through about 4,000 partner stores, on just under $120 million of venture money. The 2020 lockdowns did the rest. Orders ran at ten times the normal volume, and the same year exposed the weak floor under them, a breach announced on 28 July 2020 that leaked the contact details of roughly 2.5 million customers.

Uber announced on 2 February 2021 that it would buy Drizly for approximately $1.1 billion in stock and cash, and closed the deal that October. The plan was to put the marketplace inside Uber Eats and keep Drizly running as its own app. Three years later, on 16 January 2024, Uber said it had "decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy" and that the brand would be discontinued by March. No report ever carried a last day. Not even the domain resolves anymore.

There was no version of this for Ankara, and not for lack of ambition. Turkey banned selling alcohol over the internet in 2013, so the whole category Drizly lived in does not exist here, and the quick-commerce apps that arrived later carry everything except the one thing Drizly carried.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the id scan ~

The age check was the product. A store clerk refuses a sale at a counter; Drizly moved that moment to a doorstep and made a driver do it with a phone, and the scan was what let a marketplace of independent shops sell a controlled substance under fifty different state regimes without holding a license of its own. Every later app that put beer in the basket, Uber Eats included, inherited the doorstep scan.

~ 2.5 million rows ~

The Federal Trade Commission's order of 24 October 2022 did something unusual for a data case: it applied personally to the chief executive, James Cory Rellas, "who presided over Drizly's lax data security practices as CEO", and it followed him to any future company he ran. Drizly was told to destroy the data it did not need and to stop collecting what it could not protect. The order was two years old when Uber closed the app.

~ what uber did with it ~

Not much, by its own account. The 2021 plan was to integrate Drizly into Uber Eats, and TechCrunch noted in 2024 that this never happened. The app ran on beside Eats for three years while Eats grew its own alcohol aisle, until there was one delivery app with a liquor category and a second one with nothing else and a consent order attached to its name. Uber said the stores would stay reachable through Eats. The bear did not make the move.

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