The Return of the Brick-and-Mortar Store

As Amazon remains seemingly unstoppable and the struggles of physical retailers like Toys "R" Us continue to make headlines, two trends in retail seem irrefutable: E-commerce will only get bigger, and physical retail needs to figure out how to reinvent itself. But some of the economic pressures facing both industries are changing the value equation. For the first time since the dawn of e-commerce, physical retail might find itself with some cost advantages over e-commerce firms — especially those not named Amazon.

The march of e-commerce has certainly looked inexorable. As a percentage of total retail sales, it matched its all-time high of 9.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017, and gained share on a year-over-year basis at its fastest rate ever. At current growth rates e-commerce will be 10 percent of retail sales in 2018, and 15 percent by the middle of next decade.