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> The concentration of surviving retail businesses into big box stores and higher-end retailer

$/ft^2 is the metric to look for. That correlates with "high end" retail (high dollar items that take up less floor/warehouse space).

I think we could see a boon of brick and mortars that are smaller and more optimized. Just an anecdote, I know of a local music shop that cut its floorspace in half about 5 years ago and started offering staple items as a subscription service (e.g. reeds, guitar strings, bow rosin, whatever), while the bigger items had their shelf space rented out to vendors rather than taking commission on sales. Another anecdote, StitchFix and Bonobos have both provided solutions to the problem of selling clothes without stocking various sizes at a retail location.

There's a lot of opportunity to innovate retail in my opinion. The issue has always been the sales model, and I think that focusing on "big box" stores is wrong - they're just more equipped to weather the storm. Department stores died a decade ago, it just took this long for their bodies to hit the ground. Same for big box retail.