Now as small businesses all fall to e-commerce (often in part because their taxes were raised to compensate lowering residential property taxes) residents of small towns are finally coming to realize that all these services they've been provided actually cost money.
The problems in rural areas stem from lack of new job growth since 2008 implosion, and jobs with poor wages (and not enough of these even). Not gonna help people buy much online.
Logistics around literal access aren't the issue. It's the same old tune: financial access.
Putting a website up in place of a catalog doesn't solve that problem.
This is like saying that playing video games over the internet is nothing new, because hey, people already played games over distance in the form of chess by mail.
Yep, Sears catalog appeared in 1888.