To be honest, as much as I know the pandemic is blamed for the decline of in-person shopping; I think this would have eventually happened anyway.
From my perspective, the pandemic merely accelerated trends that had been indicated for quite a few years beforehand; even pre-COVID, online shopping was massively increasing in prevalence and use, and in-person shopping was going out of fashion somewhat. You only have to look at how brands like Toys-R-Us fell to online shopping; correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t Toys-R-Us’ bankruptcy at least partially caused by the fact that people simply weren’t willing to drive out-of-town to buy toys anymore when they could just buy them online?
Speaking from personal experience; even when I was a young child in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we went to Cribbs Causeway in Bristol to do shopping all the time. But I could possibly count on one hand the number of times that I’ve been to any bricks-and-mortar shopping mall, not just Cribbs, in the last 5 years. I haven’t been to Cribbs Causeway once since COVID hit, and our visit to Clarks Outlet Village on the way home from Plymouth in July 2021 felt like the first time in a while I’d been to a physical shopping mall. Admittedly, this might be because I’m not really a huge shopper in general nowadays, but even my mum’s visit frequency to Cribbs seems to have quite drastically decreased in the last few years (even pre-COVID) compared to when we were kids.
And then the pandemic hit. When even the simple act of leaving the house for an extended period of time became taboo at points, online shopping was our only real choice. For quite a few people (certainly for me, who isn’t a huge shopper), I’d argue that this made them question what the point of in-person shopping was; why traipse to a department store or mall to buy something when you can order it online in one click? I know for some things, in-person shopping still can’t be beaten (for instance, I imagine you’d rarely buy something like a car online), but a lot of things that you used to buy from town centres and malls can be bought far more easily online nowadays. I know some do like bricks-and-mortar shopping, but I think online is simply easier for many people nowadays, and the option that many prefer.
I know that city centres and malls near me certainly seem less vibrant shops-wise than they were a few years ago. Most recently, the Debenhams in Gloucester closed, with its replacement being a new City Campus for the University of Gloucestershire, which is opening in 2023. When we had some time to kill after testing out my uni walking route, me and my dad briefly strolled through Regent’s Arcade in Cheltenham last summer, which my dad said he remembered being a great shopping spot in the 90s and 2000s, and he was stunned at how sparse and empty it was. There were a lot of closed shops; I dare say there were more shops closed than open.
TL;DR: As much as the pandemic is commonly blamed for the decline of in-person shopping, I think it simply accelerated trends that would have happened anyway. Even pre-COVID, in-person shopping was decreasing in popularity while online was increasing, and I think COVID removing in-person shopping for extended periods made quite a few question the point of it for many things.