Online shopping took the categories it could take – anything standardised, comparable and shippable. What remained in physical shops was not the residue; it was the part that a website is structurally bad at.
What stayed physical
Things you need now. Groceries, pharmacy, hardware for the job you are in the middle of. Delivery has eroded this and not eliminated it.
Things you need to try. Clothing and footwear, where fit matters and returns are a nuisance. Furniture, where seeing it matters. Anything where the purchase is partly about the experience of choosing.
Things that are cheap to make and expensive to ship. Bulky, heavy, low-value items where shipping cost dominates.
And services attached to goods – repair, fitting, advice – which online has never replicated.
How surviving shops changed
Smaller footprints, less stock, more emphasis on the thing online cannot provide. Staff who know the products rather than just the till. Click-and-collect, which uses the shop as a pickup point for online orders and turns a cost centre into a logistics node.
What is still shrinking
Mid-market department stores, which offered convenience and range and lost both arguments to websites. Mall anchors. Electronics retail, where the product is standardised and the information is online.
The counter-movement
Online-first brands opening physical locations, because acquiring customers online got expensive and a shop is a form of advertising that also sells things. That would have seemed backwards a decade ago.
The realistic picture
Fewer shops, doing more specific things, in locations where people already are. The high street of the future is smaller and probably better.