Retail stores, which were closing due to declining foot traffic even before the pandemic, are now increasingly being turned into online fulfillment centers
As the demand for in-person shopping diminishes, landlords, startups and retailers are converting abandoned stores into online fulfillment centers Tweets: @denniswygmans , @mjasay , @mims , @paytonchung , @wsj , @mspllc , and @kayezad Tweets: Dennis Wygmans / @denniswygmans : @Techmeme @QualityNinja @mims Can't believe it took a pandemic to come to their senses. Big box retail and smaller cousins could in most cases serve as showrooms and fulfillment centers. A lot of people want to try/compare before they buy. Doesn't mean you have to have shelves filled with goods. Matt Asay / @mjasay : Love this from @mims: “When you include all the jobs in fulfillment, delivery, and related roles, e-commerce has created more jobs between 2007 and January 2020 than bricks-and-mortar retailers lost” https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : Lumberton, NC, pop. 20,000, is home to an experiment in converting our old economy into the new one, with profound and far-reaching implications for the future of cities and jobs: Stores are being converted into e-commerce fulfillment warehouses. https://www.wsj.com/... Payton Chung / @paytonchung : Obsolete big-box retail is well suited for logistics—great ground-floor access, relatively low upfit (interior conversion) costs. https://twitter.com/... @wsj : How does a beverage company in Montana get tonic water to New Yorkers in two hours? With a micro-fulfillment center. Welcome to the future of e-commerce. https://www.wsj.com/... Nick Owens / @mspllc : WSJ: The Next Phase of the Retail Apocalypse: Stores Reborn as E-Commerce Warehouses | As the demand for in-person shopping diminishes, landlords, startups and retailers are converting abandoned stores into online fulfillment centers https://www.wsj.com/... Kayezad E Adajania / @kayezad : As Americans abandon stores in favor of online shopping, the places where they've stopped shopping are being converted into warehouses to ship them goods. https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This story lands mid-pandemic, when the shift from physical to virtual commerce that normally takes years compressed into months and storefronts emptied faster than landlords could re-lease them. The response was pragmatic: rather than demolish or discount dead retail space, owners and operators are retrofitting it for the demand that actually exists — picking, packing, and last-mile delivery.
The move anticipated what followed: by late 2021 fast-grocery players were running purpose-built dark stores in urban retail spaces, and chains like Target had already leaned into curbside pickup as stores doubled as fulfillment nodes during Amazon's early-pandemic stumbles.
First-order effects
- Landlords of abandoned big-box and smaller-format stores gain a new tenant class — startups and retailers paying for warehouse-grade use of space built for shoppers, converting vacancy into rent.
- Retailers keep assets on their books productive: a closed store becomes a forward-positioned inventory node closer to customers than any suburban distribution center.
Second-order effects
- Fast grocery delivery companies formalized the improvisation into dedicated dark-store networks, competing with traditional retail for the same urban commercial square footage and reshaping neighborhood streetscapes in the process.
- Store-based fulfillment pushed chains like Target toward pickup-first operations, blurring the line between a shop and a distribution point and pressuring pure-play e-commerce rivals whose advantage was centralized warehousing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, retail real estate bifurcates by function — some locations priced as logistics infrastructure rather than merchandising space — while the reverse flow already visible by 2023, when nearly half of tracked online apparel, footwear, and accessories brands opened physical stores amid rising digital advertising costs, points toward hybrid formats rather than outright retail extinction.
The trend: US retail real estate is being repriced around logistics value, with the same square footage cycling between storefront, fulfillment node, and back again as channel economics shift.