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Amazon Will Bring You Booze in One Hour, Starting in Seattle

If that's not a reason to sign up for Prime, what is?

Shutterstock / Joseph Sohm
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

Finally, a really good reason to use Amazon’s one-hour delivery service.

The e-commerce company has started to offer one- and two-hour delivery of beer, wine and hard liquor with the launch of its Prime Now service in the Seattle area, the company announced today. Seattle is the first U.S. city to have booze delivery made available through Prime Now; London was the first international city to get the privilege back in June.

Prime Now is Amazon’s new expedited delivery option available in parts of nine American cities that is exclusive to members of Amazon’s $99-a-year Prime shipping membership. The service, available only through the Prime Now mobile app, offers Prime members delivery of a smaller catalogue of goods than the main Prime program. But eligible products can be delivered within two hours for no delivery charge, and in one hour for $7.99.

A host of startups including Drizly and Minibar are focused on building businesses exclusively around same-day delivery of alcohol. Drizly is already servicing Seattle; Minibar is not.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to specify which cities may get alcohol delivery next.

“We will continue to learn from customers and if they love the offering of alcohol in the service, we will look to continue to expand it,” she said in an email.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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