I'm not sure if your article and title were simply written to provoke a response, but you are way off the mark. If someone uniformed reads your article, you'd be doing them a disservice.  First you are looking at just a couple of small examples rather than the big picture.  Sure, it makes sense to open stores for prescription eyeglasses, they are a custom product and trying them on your face just makes sense.  With that said, hundreds of thousands of glasses get sold online at stores like clearly.ca.  I'm also willing to bet my life savings there are a ton of gardening stores that operate successfully online, just because the company your friend worked for didn't execute and failed doesn't prove anything.  In two seconds I found gardeners.com, the 12,000 most popular website in the USA.   Many companies have been enabled to succeed by the online marketplace where they would have otherwise failed.  Online shopping is rapidly growing not waning, get your head out of the sand!