The truth is that retail, conceived as "the business of distributing items to shopping centres where consumers will converge and buy them", is on its way out. The business will become "providing customized/tailored services related to products" (e.g. Apple's "geniuses") or indeed showrooming (where producers pay retailers to exhibit their products and optionally collect orders).

This has been coming since the 90s, but I bet it will still take a long time to move on. What is unclear is how much this will impact employment: there's a good chance that new models will not require the same (massive) amount of labour currently employed in retail.