Naturally: because it is redundant.
Both retailers and distributors (wholesalers in colloquial language) will go west.

Black Box operator companies, described in the preceding publication, will provide manufacturers with a complete set of services, delivering (in the broad sense) their product to the end customer – and the latter’s money, in the opposite direction.

The BBs themselves will SELL nothing any longer.

In a perfectly competitive market, that we rapidly approaching with Internet and online business development, sales as such are an utterly profitless affair.

BB revenue is formed by a service fee (a turnover percentage, to put it simply).

The vendor engagement scheme is quite simple: an abstract Ivan Pavlovich Rasputin, a sole proprietor weaving bast shoes near Pskov, opens the BB’s website, registers there, types in his shipment waybill, pays his security deposit with a plastic card and gets the address of his nearest BB hub and the hour when his van is expected to pull up at Dock Shelter No. ХХ.
He brings his bast shoes, hands them over and is happy to return to his birch bark business. Optionally (and for extra money), a BB forwarder will drive to his place and collect product.
All the rest is done by the BB’s automatic algorithms: posting on sites, distribution across the whole goods handling network of the BB operator company, and remitting the money to Comrade Rasputin’s account as the bast shoes sell.

Can a bast shoe weaver from a remote Pskov hamlet even dream, today, of his products being sold via thousands of outlets across e.g. the Russian Federation, to say nothing of global Internet, and shipped to the buyer the day after? Or immediately at some places?

Of course, Ivan will have access to adjustable automatic pricing mechanisms 24 hours a day on top of it (but will also be able to type his prices in manually) and to goods optimization logic that can be fine-tuned. He will certainly be able to play with his shoe prices even ten times a day, and they will be instantly updated all over Russia – at no extra charge.

The BB’s analytical servers (without a single human analyst) will certainly keep digesting colossal volumes of SKU movement data throughout the BB operator’s logistical network and suggest the pricing and goods distribution strategies most relevant at the moment to Ivan (whether he is after maximum sales rate, or maximum profit, or a combination of borderline parameters). Also free of charge.

And when our abstract Ivan realizes (quite soon) that manual interference it not worth the time and nerves it takes and he’d better click on the big red ‘Auto Manage Things’ checkbox (rather than button), it is the tireless intellectual management system  that will keep the sales parameter combination optimized 24 hours a day and error-free (far better than Ivan would himself), while our hero concentrates on his core business of weaving the best bast shoes at minimal costs.

For this model’s slogan for the vendor Target Audience is, ‘Just create. We’ll do the rest.’.

What will an abstract Lee Xi Qing, owner of a shop making Chinese ‘antiques’ in the Xinjiang province of China, do? Quite the same.
The only difference is that he will register and type in his waybill in the Chinese interface of the BB website and take his fake antiques to his local forwarder’s warehouse authorized by the BB operator.
Or, again, for an extra payment, the forwarder’s driver will pick up the antique treasures right at Lee’s sweatshop.

Sony or, say, Xiaomi will operate exactly in the same manner.

If the vendor so wishes, his goods can be offered on any number of parallel websites (or on his own only – an exclusive proposition for collective farms like Vertu) that will automatically place orders with the BB’s single management system via an open API.

Again, exclusivity fans may keep their own branded collection points (and delivery orders will be packed into the brand’s bags at the BB hub); in this case, the customer will never know about the BB’s very existence.

How will they sell the same goods from different suppliers and differently priced? On a FIFO-like basis, but with cheaper goods being sold first, rather than first arrivals. Given suppliers’ natural desire to get their money as soon as possible, such a mechanism will automatically guarantee the lowest prices in the market – the most watertight (while not always decisive) argument for a customer’s choice.

And what about warranty? Receiving and processing warranty claims is a component of the BB’s comprehensive service, paid for by the supplier.

And now the tastiest thing: the model’s economics.
Depending on the degree of automation (warehouse men / drivers are the bottleneck today), the BB will achieve a costs to turnover ratio of 1% (in 5-7 years) to 4-5% (today).
For your understanding: for traditional retailers, like M.Video, the order of this quantity is 25 %.
For hybrid models like Ulmart, some 15 %.

The profit margin now considered acceptable in retail is 2 %.

Now some arithmetic: even today, if we take a 4% net profit margin that is an outstanding one (twice the industry’s ordinary) and add the BB’s own maximum cost rate, we’ll get a total of 9 % of the goods’ cost.
This is the BB’s resultant fee, constituting the full cost price for the vendor of the whole block of the sales. logistics, warranty, and revenue processing services.

To the consumer, the BB format guarantees the current prices and the broadest goods mix available that NO seller can ever offer in the existing formats.

There is a less obvious point concerning the promotion of this model.
Big vendors will try to ignore this new sales channel for as long as possible.
For a whole set of reasons: from the banal laziness of their office fat cats who see no need to move their sit-upon, to corruption in the Vendor-Distributor-Retail goods processing network, populated at every stage by the ‘right’ people who roll pleasant amounts with up to six or seven zeros back into their pockets in a relaxed manner.
So initially the BB model’s development will be supported by small manufacturers (with a small presence in the specific market – but not necessarily small companies on the global scale) that have few chances in the current market configuration.
And when the fat cats at their rotten feeding places feel their chairs getting hot as their market share clearly dwindles, then they will turn to the BBs, too, and join the common queue.
Such was the BestBuy story of the 1980s.
Incidentally, this format will become the ideal measure of support for small manufacturers worldwide - without any government’s participation.

P.S. We return to the heading. Retail in the broad sense will not die away completely, of course.

Street retail, i.e. shops flanking the streets, are known since high antiquity. The current shopping malls are just an aesthetic alternative to prehistoric bazaars. Even the awfully clumsy department stores are not extinct yet.

The mainstream belief of today’s ‘analysts’ that the industry will develop by docking online sales to traditional supermarkets is nonsense (‘the majority is always wrong’, Ortega y Gasset).
Hybrids are NOT viable at all in the long run. 
Their evolutionary role is that of an intermediate stage in the transition from the former stationary state (the hypermarkets that last revolutionized retail in the 1960s) to the future steady-state format of the BBs.

So it is only natural that the worldwide greats like Walmart/Carrefour (and our  homegrown mini greats) are generally unsuccessful as they tamper with online trade. The opposite result would be strange, on the contrary.

P.P.S. Talking of hybrids:

If we are to believe those low-competent and bullshit-prone Russian business writers, Alibaba, eBay and Amazon are the bleeding edge now.

But let us take a closer look.

Alibaba.
What does it offer to the manufacturer?
A well-publicized goods placement and payment floor.
On the customer’s side, it provides access to small Chinese factories and a crappily organized online catalogue.
That’s all.
That’s really all.

And if we sweep that senseless journalistic verbiage off the screen, Alibaba is an outsourced (and overpriced) Chinese-like online store service for IT-ignorant peasants from the illiterate provinces of China. The whole success of Alibaba is essentially a function of Chinese backwardness as regards both IT and English language skills. 
Which actually forced multi-million herds of Chinese, unaware of alternatives, into that lopsided clone of Ebay and produced a hurricane-like sweeping onslaught with a lasting effect – to upsell Alibaba. And then money drew money, and herds drew herds. Might makes right.

Characteristically, eBay, a well-implemented prototype of the former, never evolved into anything similar. And it couldn’t, due to the U.S. market’s and the Americans’ proper level of development.
EBay’s market position is still based on the sale of used and semi-exclusive goods unsuitable for massive processing in classical retail. So eBay has provided no real competition to Walmart or BestBuy.

The useful functionality of Alibaba or eBay is clearly a small o of a BB’s, which is also implemented on an entirely different level of capacity and quality. And much cheaper.

Yandex.Market, you say? You’re dismissed.

Amazon?
Here the situation is a bit more interesting.

Amazon does allow third-party vendors to use its services, including the online showcase, warehouses, and delivery.

BUT: for Amazon it is concomitant service.
And for a BB it is bread and butter.

Technically, this makes no big difference.
​But in terms of marketing (practically), they are worlds apart.

The existence (and consequent priority) of Amazon’s own sales guarantees a very small number of vendors that will consider Amazon their only (or principal) sales channel – while it is essential to the model’s replication.
Whatever Amazon may tell or guarantee to them, and however it may attract them, NOTHING will help.
As old Mr. Trout would repeat many times, the marketing battles go on in the small, dark and frowzy space of the human brain-case.

For the customer, Amazon is an Online store. A very big and well-known one, of course, but – just ‘one of’. By no means is it the default place where all the goods of America are sold at the very best prices. Nor will it become one – at least in its current format under today’s brand.

The example of Amazon illustrates the thesis in our preceding publication  — that it is not the inventor (almost always forgotten) but one who applies the invention correctly that both history and the future generations will call a man of genius.
This makes the difference between innovations and mere inventions.