Never has the buyer of consumer goods had more power than he possesses today, for instance, with apps that are freely available for smart-phones and the like he can go into a traditional brick and mortar store, take out his phone and by scanning in the barcode or the QR code of a given product be able to almost instantly see other stores that are offering the exact same product and the price that they are selling it for. This means that the brick and mortar store rather than being seen as a place to actually shop and to thereby purchase a given product is seen more as a place to show-room products, see their performance or demonstration of, feel and test them, but the actual purchase will frequently be made somewhere entirely else, that has a better overall price.
Not too surprisingly, the brick and mortar store has two very big disadvantages to most online competitors the first of which is that brick and mortar stores are almost always compelled to collect sales tax on the products that they sell, of which, none of this sales tax money goes to the store, but are in fact, distributed to the tax agencies as directed by the city, State, and local sales tax laws. The other big disadvantage is that the brick and mortar store has set up their store in such a manner that it can showcase many products in a format that is pleasing to the eye, in addition to having to pay for experienced and knowledgeable personnel, the actual building, utilities, taxes and so forth. The non-brick and mortar stores may or may not even have physical inventory of the given product that they are selling but may instead be utilizing a warehouse as their proxy for the goods and the actual shipment of the goods will come from that warehouse to which perhaps the given item has never even been inspected or had the original shipping container open. Obviously, in those types of cases, and especially in situations to which the online retailer doesn't charge the consumer sales tax, they have enormous pricing advantages that a brick and mortar store simply can't compete against. While this does appear to be a total victory for the consumer as he purchases a product at a cheaper price point, as well as being beneficial to the online retailer that has determined where to price the product at in order to maintain a reasonable gross margin, the story doesn't really end there.
The fact of the matter is, there are losers, the first being the brick and mortar store and its business model, along with its employees, its management, and its stockholders. In addition, lost sales tax, lost property taxes, lost business taxes, and so forth are also overall losers for the community and society at large. Still that might be okay if it wasn't for one more additional issue and that is, the very people that walk into these brick and mortar stores without the intent to purchase the product from that store have conducted themselves in a way that is unethical. That is to say that it most definitely is a false front to enter any place of business without the intention of conducting business within that establishment. These stores are not in the charity business they are in business to sell product to consumers and they are not glorified testing or show-room stores created so as to help you try and test products to buy elsewhere at a cheaper overall price-point.
That said, there are plenty of people that believe that none of this applies to them, personally, and/or believe that brick and mortar stores should just suck it up and recognize that this is a brave new world. Perhaps that is true, what is definitely true, however, is those that they are above it all, exceptions to the rule, special, and so forth, will find themselves one day, soon enough, playing against those that believe just the same, only those players make sure to control the die, and the rules of the game.