Your driver on a delivery run, and the two policies behind it

A delivery run is the only part of a package store that leaves the building. Your shelves, your coolers and your register sit at one address and are insured at one address. The moment an order goes out the door, the business is operating somewhere it does not control, inside a machine that may not even belong to it.

Commercial auto is the policy for the machine. It answers for harm done to other people and their property when a vehicle is being used in your business — a van with the store name on the side, a pickup doing a wholesale drop, and the car a clerk used on a night the van was in the shop.

What this page is really about is that the machine is only half of a delivery. The other half never touches an auto policy at all, and it is the half stores forget to move.

A delivery has two halves and they sit on different policies

Break a delivery down to what it actually consists of and there are two components: a vehicle travelling somewhere, and a hand-off at the other end.

The vehicle is this policy. Someone is driving on behalf of your store, in traffic, on a schedule, often in the dark, and the exposure is the ordinary and very large one that every business with a vehicle carries.

The hand-off is not an auto question at all. The person receiving the order has to be old enough to receive it and in a condition to receive it, and that verification is the same duty your clerks perform at the counter. It is a liquor liability question wherever it is performed. What delivery does is relocate it — off your premises, away from the light and the camera at your register, onto a doorstep in whatever conditions the evening produced.

That is the whole point of the page. A store that added delivery and revised neither policy is normally short on both sides of it: the driving exposure grew without the underwriter being told, and the verification moved while the liquor form still describes a counter. Fixing one and not the other is the common outcome, and it leaves the store insured for the half it happened to remember.

Owned vehicles, and what owned really means

The straightforward part of this policy is the vehicle the business bought. The van, the pickup, the car titled to the store or to you and used for it. Each one goes on a schedule, each one is rated on what it is and what it does, and the policy answers for it.

The complication is that use matters as much as title. A car registered personally but doing bank runs, stock pickups and the occasional order is being used in the business whatever the paperwork says. Whether the policy covering it was written against that description is a question worth asking before an accident rather than during the claim, because it is asked either way.

The plainest gap in this whole class is also the simplest: a vehicle that never made it onto the schedule. Stores buy a second van in the spring, add it to the operation immediately and to the policy eventually, and the interval between those two events is pure exposure. Scheduling is a phone call. Discovering the omission from an adjuster is not.

Hired and non-owned: the half with no vehicle in it

The other side of the auto question involves no vehicle you own at all, which is exactly why it goes missing.

Non-owned is the shift somebody used their own car. Your delivery driver takes a couple of orders out on the way home. A clerk runs a forgotten case across town because the customer is a regular. The store directed the trip and the store benefited from it, so the store is in any claim that follows, regardless of whose name is on the registration.

Hired is the vehicle you rent or borrow — a van for a holiday week, a truck for a one-off move between locations, anything brought in while your own vehicle is off the road.

Neither appears on a vehicle schedule, because there is nothing to schedule. That is the trap. An owner reads a policy that lists every vehicle the store owns, finds all of them present and correct, and concludes the auto side is finished. The schedule is complete and the coverage is not, and nothing on the page says so.

What it covers, and what it does not

Liability is the core of the policy: injury to other people and damage to their property arising out of the use of a covered vehicle in your business. That is the part with the serious severity in it, because a delivery run puts your store into the ordinary traffic risk that every other vehicle on the road carries, with your name attached.

Damage to the vehicle itself is a separate and optional part of the policy, and it is a commercial decision rather than a protection one. A store running an old pickup on short local runs may reasonably choose differently from a store running a wrapped van it cannot replace quickly.

What it does not do is worth being blunt about. It does not answer for the injury to your own driver — that is workers compensation, on a different policy with a different adjuster and a different set of rules. It does not answer for the check at the door, which stays with the liquor form no matter who drove. Premises incidents stay where they were: a customer who trips coming through your door is still a general liability matter. And because the liability sections concern harm to others, they are not the answer for your own inventory going over on a corner — ask which part of the property side responds to stock in transit rather than assuming this policy does.

Common claim categories

Four shapes account for most of what comes up in this class at a package store. None of them carries a figure here, because severity in traffic claims is driven by injury outcomes that vary enormously and a representative number would be an invention.

The run that ends at an intersection. An ordinary collision on an ordinary road, made a business claim only by who the driver was working for. It is the most severe category and the least distinctive.

The parked-and-unloading incident. A door opened into traffic, a hand trolley that got away on a slope, a reverse into a bollard in a tight loading spot. Low-speed, unglamorous, and common enough that stores stop reporting them.

The personal-car run. An employee driving their own vehicle on a store errand, which puts the business into a claim it has no vehicle in and, without the hired-and-non-owned piece, no coverage for.

The doorstep hand-off. An order handed to the wrong person, or to someone the check would have stopped. This one lands on the liquor form rather than here, and it is the category that grew when delivery did.

Who is driving, and what an underwriter asks

Underwriting this line is mostly underwriting people. The vehicle is a known quantity; the person behind the wheel is the variable.

Expect to be asked who drives, and to answer with names rather than with a category. Expect questions about driving records and how often you look at them, about whether there is a written rule for who may take an order out and who may not, about whether the store uses anyone else’s car and under what arrangement, about how far a run ordinarily goes and at what hour, and about what the store expects of a driver holding a phone.

Each of those maps to a control rather than to curiosity. A written driver rule is provable and a habit is not. A record check performed on a schedule is a different fact at trial from one performed after an accident. Evening runs describe a different risk from afternoon runs, and an underwriter would rather hear that from you than infer it from a loss.

Limits and structure

Auto limits come in two shapes. One is a combined amount covering injury and property damage together; the other splits them into separate amounts that apply separately. Two policies can look almost identical on a summary and behave very differently against the same accident, so it is worth knowing which shape yours takes.

Three structural questions do more work than the headline figure.

Is hired and non-owned actually on the policy? It is usually an addition rather than a separate contract, which makes it easy to leave off and easy to add. This is a yes-or-no question with a same-day answer, and it is the first one to ask.

Uninsured and underinsured motorists. The other driver’s insurance is the one thing in a collision you have no influence over. What your policy does when the other side has nothing is a decision, not a default.

What sits above it. A commercial umbrella extends over the auto policy only where the auto policy is named in the schedule of underlying policies. Traffic severity is the ordinary reason a retail business needs something above the primary layer, so the schedule is worth reading rather than assuming.

Finally, disclosure. A policy written on a store that does not deliver is a policy written about a different business from the one you are now running. Telling us before the change costs nothing; telling an adjuster afterwards is a conversation about whether the risk insured was the risk that existed.

Why Liquor Store Guard Insurance

We are an independent agency, which matters on this line for a specific reason: the market that happily writes a package store’s premises risk is not automatically comfortable with its delivery risk, and appetite for retail alcohol delivery has been moving. Knowing where it currently sits is our job rather than yours.

What we actually do is check the joins. Whether every vehicle in the yard is on the schedule. Whether hired and non-owned was ever added. Whether the auto policy is named underneath the umbrella. And — the one nobody asks for — whether the liquor liability form knows that your store now hands bottles to people at their own front doors. The gaps in this class rarely sit inside a single policy. They sit in the space between two of them.

Learn more

• Liquor liability — the doorstep half of a delivery, which this policy never reaches.
• Workers compensation — for the driver’s own injury when a run ends badly.
• General liability — the incidents that stay on your premises rather than travelling with an order.
• Property and crime — where to ask about stock in transit and about the vehicle as an asset.
• Liquor Store Insurance — how the six coverages fit together on one package store.

All six coverages