TImes change and shopping evolves. What Amazon is doing is essentially what Sears and Roebuck used to do; sell everything anyone can want and deliver it to their door. Sears did it with catalogs, Amazon does it with a website. Sears was perfectly positioned to be what Amazon has become back when they had their catalogs and merchandise distribution centers. Sears leadership didn't foresee the future and decided to become more like Walmart and KMart instead of stay how they were. It was a bad decision. Had they continued to sell everything to everyone and evolved from paper catalogs to a website, Amazon would likely still be selling only books.
There were also catalog stores with showrooms for a while, Basco, Best, and Service Merchandise among them. I suspect we're heading back that way nowadays where you can order anything you want from an online catalog/website and then either pick it up in the store or have it delivered. Combine a modern smartphone with an app and a Best/Service Merchandise type showroom where the shopper can browse the aisles and scan any item they want to buy, then finalize their purchase on the phone, pay for it on the phone, and have it all ready for pickup or delivery a few seconds later and you'd likely have a pretty popular store.
The catalog showroom type store setup is pretty space efficient and seriously cuts down on theft. With modern automation and robots collecting customer's orders as they shop and the payment and ordering all done by phone, you'd need minimal workers to serve a large number of customers quickly and efficiently. A large warehouse area connected to the showroom with robots gathering the products ordered, much like how Amazon runs their warehouses now, could be pretty efficient and effective. Done right, a chain of stores based on that model could actually ding the Walmarts of the world.
The two things that are Walmart's weakness are staffing (they have a lot of employees) and theft. A Service Merchandise type store model with only display items in reach pretty much ends theft. A fully automated ordering, buying, and delivering system would reduce the number of employees needed. Done right, such a system could be faster and easier for the consumer, provide lower prices, provide greater variety, and still be quite profitable for the owner. Amazon's pretty nicely positioned to create such stores these days. All they really need to do is take a warehouse like they have now and add a showroom.
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