And is being replaced with what? The 21st century equivalent of the the door to door salesman? That's what online is. I've never bought a thing through Amazon and probably never will. I personally don't care one iota for what other people think of a product (reviews) and I place great value in the sales process from start to finish.
Not sure of the semblance between door-to-door salesmen and Amazon tbh. As for online shopping, you need to realize at least in cities, that is becoming a sizable form of purchase type. Corona currently is demonstrating how much faster such a thing can proliferate, and how much people actually desire the outcome.
The sorts of notions you hold in this regard reminded me of my father that never wanted a cell phone (I can sympathize why, as he didn't want to be on-call 24/7 from employers, or even just friends at all times of the day, so usually when people would be out for dinner, he didn't expect to have someone expect him to be establishing a communication). Naturally - considering if you're outside, you're not near your home landline for people to be able to bother you anyway.
The thing is though, after his employer provided him a phone by force, he couldn't say no. In the same way shoppers wanting certain items that are disappearing from their vicinity, will need to relent and go the online route. You simply have no choice on the matter, as that is the majority paradigm that's taking over, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
Also quickly.. To the notions of "great value in the sales process", those exist today as well - just not in the form you're in line with. A website/advertisement/customer support is a sales process. Some do it bad, some do it well.
Oh and quickly again, to the idea of not caring what reviewers think. That strikes me as odd, as I've dodged bullets on issues people have pointed out about products, and nuanced reviews that provide objective informational value (something like the sorts of reviews you see here). Granted of course, is the label of most reviews being shovelware. But it is an aggregate of some data that is useful nonetheless in some fashion. To not care at all about them strikes me as peculiar, as if you want to burden yourself with discovering potential things that could be revealed by the experience of others.
Like everything sales related, it goes full circle and has done forever. People go on about uber eats/air tasker and home delivery being "disruptors" when they are absolutely nothing of the sort. My father had the butcher, baker, grocer, gardener etc all deliver or provide services to their home when he was a boy in the 1930/40s. Personalized shopping was the norm. The lady of the house picked up the phone and the butcher turned up at the back door.
Oh okay, so you understand in that case sales still exist, but just in a different form.
As for pickup phone service, that still exists, it's just relegated to higher-end living locales, but since the cost of employing full-time people for such jobs, it's not just being made more business efficient by mega companies specialized in a specific task, in the same way you have DAC parts being made all from pieces from specialized companies that no one single entity can outdo in an exclusive creation of a DAC using completely bespoke design.
As far as "disruptors" that is an idiotic bait term used to lure braindead investors. That word is in my cringe-list like most other terms lately (others include, Big Data, Internet of Things, etc...). Though "dispruptors" is more in the realm of mega cringe like "growth hacking" "actionable insights" and such others.
But yeah, it doesn't make sense for the actual butcher himself to be coming to your back door. This might still pass as I said in non-city areas. But in cities, I'm not sure there's a backdoor, or enough butchers to personally do literally anything.
Retail is cyclic. The death of the mall/high street results in online (the equivalent of catalog in the early 20th century), and soon after, people will tire of the stuff that doesn't fit, doesn't meet standard or doesn't offer something unique and they will search out the places where they get personal service and exclusive product again. The boutiques will open, the specialists will return and the skills in sales and service will be required again.
We are in the lowest cost, least interesting, least personal, lowest standard of customer service part of the cycle.
This may be the case in the era you spoke about, up until the late 60's where society had purchasing power as a whole, rather than relegated to a select few that keep the few retail stores that exist - open. Currently, there will be no return of any of this, in the same way there will be no returning of land-line use, nor returning of expectations of not to be bothered by people at a moments notice (unless of course you want to delineate yourself from norm-thinking). People aren't tired, simply due to the fact that Amazon's growth isn't stagnating, thus signalling an antithesis to your idea. And even if they did get tired, the place Amazon has hoisted itself to, will always be in the position to react and obliterate competition (they've been known to lower prices under MSRP consistently to drive out any hint of competition, even if it means losing money themselves).
The only thing "tiredness" will result in, is another better-Amazon, but there won't be anymore glass bottled milk deliveries in crates I can tell you that much.
On an anecdotal level, the people I know, don't really care THAT much about retail experience, especially if convenience is impeded (the convenience of a few clicks to your door can't be beat by anything I know currently). Most folks simply care about products working as advertised, and having some post-sale customer support if anything goes wrong. Everything is is virtually inconsequential.
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One thing I have to finish off on, is it's not my intent to vilify or say store-fronts are bad. The only thing that makes them "bad" is what business has demonstrated to be inefficiency. And in business, efficiency is everything for the majority of things (which is why I ignore luxury sectors, since at the dollars they're concerned with, inefficiency is anything that loses clientele, anything aside from that is virtually inconsequential due to the vast sums of money thrown at any losses of inefficiency).
When companies like Amazon, Starbucks, etc.. are offering landlords vast sums of money for locations, anything that isn't raking in a lot of money from sales, is going to get chewed to pieces and spit out to the edges of society (outskirts where having a local butcher may still make some sense).
Lastly, the reason I said in my original post about physical retail "needing to die off" is the same reason the notion that every person "needs" to own one of everything, like a house, a car, a boat - would also be things that "need to die off". When you look at the issues with resources and things of that nature. All notions of property ownership need to get abandoned (just the ecological hit of the idea of providing every single living person a house and a car is insanity). This stuff can't go on, simply because there are either more pressing, or smarter ways of using our resources to achieve the same result. Like if for instance you lived in one of those smart-cities that are being pioneered by some Arabian nations in prototype testing - what sense does it make to have cars, if at any time you can summon a car to pick you up and drive you to your destination, traffic free. Or the idea of even "driving" a car in the first place if the car can drive itself and cut down on accidents to a degree, where speeding limits would evaporate as they would be useless in a fully integrated system in a few decades of development?
That is why I say these things "need" to die off. Not because I don't like them, but because the purposes they serve is just a bit self-serving of nostalgia of a way of life that was quaint, but all can see that way of life can't ever really come back, and for good reason. And certainly not in any meaningful majority.