First, McArdle lays out some of Amazon's business advantages:
[E]conomies of scale used to work in favor of [big-box giants like Best Buy]. But Amazon’s scale is even bigger: instead of hundreds of stores, they have 40 vast warehouses scattered throughout the U.S … Amazon can now site and open a new warehouse in under a year, in an industry where three- to five-year build cycles are the norm. Every holiday season, just as demand starts to spike, they open more. Best Buy likes to point out that 70 percent of Americans are within 10 minutes of a Best Buy. But 100 percent of continental Americans are just a click and a day from an Amazon warehouse. And they don’t even have to change out of their pajamas.
Is there any way for brick-and-mortar stores to complete? Marcus Wohlsen looks to eBay Now, which "lets shoppers order just about anything in stock from nearby chain stores such as Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, and Home Depot for delivery in about an hour":
By connecting shoppers with already existing local stores, eBay extends its reach from buying and selling online to buying and selling on the ground … If eBay can spread that model to cities and towns across the country, it becomes a national platform for local commerce — and a way for eBay to get people what they want faster than Amazon can, without the huge costs and risks of maintaining its own inventory of products or building warehouses.
The Dish 