Bill would require a license for alcohol delivery

Yvette Higgins

Report for Minnesota

For many people, deliveries of alcohol from companies like Doordash and Instacart are a handy convenience, but Wendy Manuel believes such deliveries jeopardized her daughter’s life. 

Manuel is a retired hospice chaplain whose daughter, Jacqueline Schiappa, died of alcohol poisoning in 2023 at age 38. 

Now Manuel is urging the Minnesota Legislature to pass a bill that would make alcohol delivery safer for customers. 

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Aric Putnam, DFL-St.Cloud, would require third-party delivery companies such as Uber Eats, Instacart and Doordash to have licenses to deliver alcohol. 

Manuel said in an interview that she and her daughter were very close. They traveled the world together, and Schiappa called Manuel “Mama Bear.” 

Schiappa got her PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communications from the University of Minnesota in 2016, according to her obituary. 

She went on to become a communications teacher at Augsburg University, Macalester College, and the University of Minnesota. She made her students feel comfortable and seen, calling them her “babies,” according to her mother. 

The University of Minnesota did not rehire Schiappa after the fall semester in 2021, according to Manuel. Soon after, she divorced, and several family pets died. 

In October 2022, Schiappa moved into an apartment and cut her mother off. Manuel said she only saw her daughter once in the summer of 2023. 

Manuel brought her daughter to the hospital after Schiappa sent her a text saying she was weak. Schiappa stayed alive in the hospital for 17 days, and all her friends visited her. 

“For a little while, she was like a queen with her court,” Manuel said. “And all this love is being poured on her.”

Manuel slept in her daughter’s bed the night before she died. Schiappa told her mother she wanted to live.  

“I don’t know why it happened, I’m never going to know,” Manuel said. 

Manuel tracked her daughter’s Instacart orders from 2020 up to her death, finding that she had ordered the equivalent of 23 servings of alcohol in one day. 

Schiappa gave instructions to the delivery person, telling them to come into her home and deliver the alcohol to her on her couch because she was unable to walk, Manuel said. 

A Minnesota law passed in 1985 prohibits providing alcohol to an obviously intoxicated person. However, third-party delivery companies are not covered by law. 

Many of the companies first started delivering alcoholic beverages during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and continued afterwards.

A study published by the National Library of Medicine found that consumers who were already intoxicated were able to have alcohol delivered to their homes. More than a quarter of the individuals in the study said they would have to stop drinking alcohol if they could not have it delivered. 

Some companies have their own policies surrounding alcohol delivery, but this bill would create consistent regulations, Putnam said at a committee hearing last Tuesday. Licenses, which would cost $500 a year, could be revoked if companies failed to adhere to regulations. 

Manuel said she doesn’t know if the bill could have saved her daughter, but she believes delivery companies need to be held liable for serving intoxicated people. 

“It’s the right thing to do,” Manuel said. 

Report for Minnesota is a project of the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication to support local news in all areas of the state.