Local Businesses and in particular Small Business were among the largest employers. I think the decline and direction is likely irreversible at least in Country Oz and at minimum I need to have freighted in from Melbourne raw materials due to this dumbing down of retail to Big Box style stores not carrying what is needed.
And that was a really terrible thing. The majority of small businesses are run like personality cults for the business owners and the employees are usually paid absolute rock bottom minimum wage while being repetitively screwed. I know - I worked for a couple of them, so did my mother. In fact my mother worked for the stereotypical small business here for many years which was a radio repair shop. Getting paid reliably and actually surviving is surprisingly difficult.
If we take Electronic components then what was here 6 or 7 years ago was a 'reasonablely' run by a Lady Engineer Store with a great idea of what her customers needed including a mix of the usual E-Toys and PC gear to keep the component side viable. She retired and the low cost PC making entity that brought her business fucked it totally in two years due mainly to NFI and the rise of Evilbay/Amazon for a lot of what they used to carry. I now have a poor attempt at an Electronics store 2 1/2 hours away which certainly isn't worth the drive to be disappointed.
Well that's a fine example of what I'm suggesting is the outcome. We had the same evolution here. Firstly there were the numerous independent electronics shops, which abused their staff and customers. Then they were replaced with minor chains like Maplin, which abused their staff and ripped off their customers. They they were commoditised along with the hardware into larger retail chains (Argos, Currys here) as the requirements for parts and repair declined. Initially they abused their customers and everyone went to Amazon who didn't. The difference is that those larger chains are going down the crapper if they don't have an excellent delivery and support service. So there's basically Argos and Amazon left now because you're right - it's not worth a 2.5 hour drive to be disappointed when someone can deliver it to you within a couple of days. And thanks to distance selling regulations coming in across the globe, if it's a steaming pile of crap, you can send it back without fuss or cost or having to argue with some grumpy curmudgeon in a shop who tells you to piss off.
What has happened really is a progression of customer service and delivery convenience.
The lack of quality support be it repair or service of goods is also screwing us over as the solution becomes junk it and buy another 2-3 year solution for the least possible $ from Evilbay/Amazon.
There are diminishing returns on buying the cheapest item out there. But people are stupid and fall for that one all the time. That's easy to leverage on probabilistic returns.
Living in a major Capital I suggest you are out of touch with small retail and community as the jobs in YOUR area are certainly more likely to be Service or Government ones. We unlike you do not have same or even next day delivery and fortunately so far AmazonOz sucks Donkey Balls.
I've lived for many years in the middle of nowhere here and got involved in the local communities. I spent my teenage years knocking around on farms and riding horses etc. There was fuck all else to do. In fact it was not much fun when you had to walk 4 miles to go to the nearest town to go through the bins on the industrial estate looking for things you could strip components out of or getting mugged by the hybrid mutant Post Office/Tandy were had. The nearest retail store (Maplin/Cirkit at the time) was an unsurmountable obstacle. The small retail outlets died in the 1980s because as mentioned there wasn't enough business to sustain them. Everyone left.
So a few weeks ago I took a drive out that way just to "go and see" and the shops are still gone apart from the odd Spar. There are new estates popping up everywhere. They have supermarkets. They have fibre. They have amazon vans driving around. They are building new schools. They have people in them again. Without that infrastructure they'd still be dead and dying places but we're seeing new communities. Granted some farts are complaining about this but fuck them as well.
As for same/next day delivery you're probably around 10 years behind us in the UK at the moment. Amazon sucked pretty hard here back then. In 2013 or so, we started to get an improvement in service as they added more logistics hubs here. Then in 2015 or so it got pretty good. In fact my father, living in the middle of nowhere on the border of Essex and Suffolk, could get next day Amazon deliveries reliably. Now in cities, we have same day delivery and nearly entire country coverage next day. I understand the US is the same now as well. AU has some unique logistics challenges as it's basically a hula-hoop when it comes to what the country really looks like (the middle bit is pretty shit) but in time they will be resolved.
Don't look at the situation, look at the progression and see where it's going.
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