That is how free markets are supposed to work. People who supply what consumers do not want are supposed to do under. We do not need the number of bricks and mortar shops we have any more than we need the number of candles people did before electric (or gas!) lighting.
I say this as someone who:
- Finds Amazon's dominance of ebook sales terrifying
- Thinks Amazon is a threat to competitive markets in many areas
- Hates using AWS
but putting bricks and mortar shops out of business is not a bad thing.
Amazon like many of these tech-tarded companies is very problematic.
Amazon has been and continues to siphon money from unrelated business to go fund another than wrecks everyone and drives 'competition' out of business. What they did to the book industry was horrendous and I've always liked indy bookstores. Where I am, I can't find a single indy book seller probably in 20+ miles.
That's my core issue. There is no sacred cow with these types. They'll go dump a billion or some large enough chunk of money to basically go pave over a whole industry. Such isn't smart, it's anti-competitive and in the long term we'll regret that we were enamoured by their quick shipping and often low enough pricing. Regret just like enough eventually reach about the monstrosity China dump called Walmart.
As far as number of brick and mortar stores we need. It depends on where you are. In the well to do suburbs in the States there are a ton of useless as businesses that I can't understand how they survive. Every third one I swear is a front for criminal activity, because money isn't coming in the front door legit.
When you get out of the hipster centers and burbs, the number of brick and mortar places is approaching zero. It's quite bad in many places, even real population centers (small cities). Lots has been wrote over the years about food deserts in regular to low income areas. Even in big cities lack of options for grocery, sometimes lacking even one choice, is how things will be wider soon enough. When disinvestment in retail happens to point of no groceries and food, inevitably all other retail there will go extinct (except the common vices - cigarettes, soda, lottery, etc.).
Mind you, I am on fence about retail in general. I shun mass produced goods as much as I can, but lack of hand crafted without great time waste usually online. I am disappointed regularly when I have to go out to find something out of the ordinary. Often am unable to find it in my store zone and pushed to buy out of necessity online. Then there is that issue with retail prices being entirely too much for cheap commodity crap.
I miss the days when we had more decent retaiers of and in the local towns.
