Two decades ago, in the Bay Area we used to have a lot of books stores, specialized, chains, children's, grade school, college slugbooks, etc. Places like Fry's had a coffee and a book store inside. The population grew, number of book stores went down to near zero.
Be careful about making narratives that don’t line up with industry data.
There’s a lot of brick and mortar retail going on. It just doesn’t look like the overbuilt mall infrastructure of the 1970s-1980s.