Expensive fulfillment warehouses. If you watch the 2000 interview of Jeff Bezos - the reason he predicted he would beat retail was because the cost of square foot of his fulfillment centers was a fraction of what retail pays.
I think for me, the more everyday a purchase is, the less I care about if the purchase goes wrong in some small way?
I do see where you’re coming from, though - I’ve many times gone through the process of:
“I wonder if amazon has any <niche item>?”
...
“Oh, Amazon has literally dozens of different <niche item>s, cool”
For me, I still prefer Amazon if it is a high value item, I check the seller though. I prefer to have my contact information/payment information stored by a company I can trust to keep it safe and in as few places as possible.
What do you base that statement on? I order lots of stuff from Amazon and almost all of it is sold by Amazon and not a third-party. Sometimes I do have to pick Amazon from the list of alternate sellers.
It worked perfectly as I got it, and the model had been on the market past the early peak of the bathtub curve, so I kept it. Still works perfectly today, too. But it taught me a valuable lesson about how far Amazon can be trusted on high-ticket items.
These days the only camera gear I get from Amazon is trivial niche stuff like eyepiece diopters that aren't worth anyone's trouble to gray-market or counterfeit. For everything else, there's my local camera store, or B&H or Adorama.
In Germany they're mostly just as quick to deliver and sane return policies are required by federal/european law. And most importantly their inventory is way better - organized, curated, categorized and genuine.
When I pay a markup, I expect something extra like curating of products so I know what the low-mid-high tier options are without sifting through tons of search results and reviews. Or at least not commingling of stock, so I know what I’m getting.
It makes sense that if Amazon is just dumping the same stuff under fake brands, why not go to the source. But anything that uses electricity could burn your house down, couldn't it?
What remains won't be vastly different, grocery will likely be the big anchor for most strip malls with small restaurants, personal care, and such filling out the rest. Pretty sure the Dollar* type stores and pharmacies will still keep their spot. Two generations and the gas stations and their tax base will be gone too but that is a different situation.
There may never be a better time to not live in cities. With the move to BEV transportation and online everything from work, shopping, and play, it will free up people to have more choices.
Suburbia also costs more to service from a cities perspective, with more pavement, miles of sewer pipes and so on, so we might very well see suburbs get more expensive than the cities too, since revenue starts becoming more about how many people live in a city vs the location of retail centers.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/27/this-is-the-en...
This is why grocery E-commerce distribution is usually done from a store estate (with the exception of occado, which has a higher cost to serve but also gives a better resulting service).
Wow this is so far off (as someone who works at an e-commerce company). Optimizing a warehouse is incredibly difficult and time consuming and often involves expensive and specialized equipment like sorters. Wayfair for instance STILL has only had like 2 profitable quarters and they specialize in e-commerce and fulfillment. Having your employees go pick things off of shelves and pack them and figure out which truck to go on is not a simple problem.
You simply aren't going to make any money if your business model is having employees physically go manually pick stuff off shelves and package them in boxes and ship them at $10 an hour.