Instacart stops selling alcohol for compliance reasons

Incidentally, of all the startups we've funded, Instacart is one of the ones we ourselves use most. Jessica can't stop talking about how great it is. You learn how useful grocery delivery when you have small children like we do, and Instacart is by far the best option for this.<p>Instacart is one of those rare products that's <i>surprisingly</i> great. I.e. you don't realize how good such a thing could be till you try it. A lot of the best startups have this quality. I wish we could figure out a way to identify them when they apply to YC, but at the moment I admit we can't.

"It’s called due diligence."<p>And this is called talking out of one's ass. It's easy to armchair quarterback from a cozy cubicle at Pando HQ. When you run an actual company, especially as a solo founder, you'll realize how thin your bandwidth gets stretched. Unless it's core, you adopt a 'cross that bridge when you get there' mentality. Which is exactly what Apoorva did here.<p>Seriously, once you go down the 'due diligence' road, there are a million things to check up on. Focus on the core to get up and running, fix things as they break and worry about the rest later.

Fortunately, Swig! (<a href="http://swigme.com" rel="nofollow">http://swigme.com</a>) is still 100% legal and open for business.<p>Swig! is an instant beer &#38; alcohol delivery service that partners directly with licensed brick &#38; mortar retailers to enable online ordering and one-hour delivery. Unlike Instacart however, we did our homework and engaged liquor licensing attorneys to vet our model.<p>Disclosure: I'm the founder of Swig! When Instacart was still selling booze, we competed with them.

I know nothing about Instacart, but are they selling the items themselves or are they just a delivery service? Although I imagine an alcohol delivery service has its own problems, specifically with regards to age verification. This shouldn't surprise anybody, alcohol law is complicated. They should feel lucky they have not been hit with heavy fines over this. Everybody in California should feel lucky they can buy alcohol at a Safeway, over here in Maryland chain grocery stores(in fact all non-franchise chains) are not allowed to have liquor licenses.

Anyone doing any business with alcohol really should check the laws first. I don't think this will seriously hurt InstaCart (I'd personally use them for food or cleaning supplies; I have too much alcohol already), but if you had an alcohol-centric business, this could be a big deal once you get traction.<p>One of the big things is in many states you can never discount alcohol or give away free alcohol. You can do stuff like free food, but even making it conditional on alcohol purchases is bad in some states (but not others).

I saw this coming, especially with their "Send beer to your friend in San Francisco" promo a few weeks ago. There are just too many regulations on alcohol.

Now this thread has been pg-jacked, I can't help but feel that the submitter's unashamed plug for swig! has severely backfired.<p>No doubt when instacart sorts out the regulatory hurdles involved in alcohol sales they'll have a bunch more subscribers courtesy of hn.<p>And so it goes.

A million Stanford undergrads cried out in fear.