An online store would "take away" business from their retail fronts and would face plentiful sabotage. It isn't like they had a frontier out west to ship to as the "new domain" that respected their nice little boundaries.
Organizations age poorly by default. People become motivated to climb the org chart--or, even easier, to stay in place while sprouting new branches under themselves. People become risk averse and unimaginative.
The only way to avoid that fate is with strong leadership. Starship will replace the Falcon 9, and I'm sure there are people on the Falcon team who are not thrilled about that, but the show goes on anyway. Everyone is on a shared mission. It's clear that SpaceX culturally doesn't tolerate people more concerned with internal politics than they are with going to space. Culture comes from the top--the founders, the CEO, and flows from there.
They could be great again if they leveraged their old "good, better, best" strategy. Instead of trying to sell all the things like Amazon and Walmart do, they should be offering a broad, curated set of items that are reliable and binned by those three quality descriptors.
This specifically addresses the issues many people have with buying from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Sears-Catalog-Roebuck-Company/dp...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vulture+capital
I'm tired of people lamenting the loss of true retail and blaming disruption for any negative changes in the world. The fact is, entire industries outside of Bezos' world flourished from these failures and continue to thrive as long as Chapters doesn't use big data, Visa doesn't make an intuitive gift card option, and the family-owned grocery store doesn't have software to share inventory online.
Most of the zombie companies had excelled at some point in the past - even a joke company like Sears was once the pinnacle of innovation. At this point I'm just convinced companies that decided to "lie down and die" are cases of competing goals among the decision-makers. Some are too non-confrontational, some are egomaniacal, some stifle innovation, some are too audacious, and lots of executives, board members, and consultants flourish regardless of the result.
The result is an unhealthy economy that is constantly getting conned by those who know how to play the game. But maybe that has always been the case...