Afford Anything · Tuesday, July 14, 2026
David Bell argues that the internet and physical retail are complements, not substitutes, challenging early predictions of e-commerce completely replacing brick-and-mortar stores. He notes that successful e-commerce businesses often incorporate a physical presence.
“So if you rewind back far enough, you'll hear very famous venture capitalists and some professors, when the internet was sort of first a thing, there was this idea that the internet's going to obliterate the physical world and we'll buy everything online and there'll never be any stores again. And obviously that's turned out to be completely untrue. Right? What's actually happened is that the internet and the real world are not actually substitutes in the way people thought of them at the beginning. Is that they are actually complements. They serve different kinds of people at different points in time or the same kind of person at a different point in time.”
“So you might want to buy a pair of Worby Parker sunglasses online, use the home try on with the software on your face, or you might want to walk into the store on Green Street. So with the benefit of hindsight, we kind of see that these two things are actually very, very complementary to each other. And even e-commerce businesses to do well typically have to have some sort of physical presence, like being direct to consumer through the internet in and of itself is not really a business.”