Impending death based on what? There’s plenty of boutiques that cater to things above “the necessities”, like groceries or clothes. Why do we need mom and pop grocery? It’s not efficient. Take a look around at the amount of thrift or boutique clothings shops, they’re small but large in number and it’s not even including purely online boutique. People who cry about the death of the corner store have insane tunnel vision.

I loved living around the corner from a small grocery store. It made it possible to pick up ingredients and fresh vegetables for dinner on the walk home from the train or when taking the dog for a walk with my wife. It was a bit more expensive, but that was offset by the fact that buying only what you need for the next couple of days leads to less spoilage and waste. Overall, our food budget has remained about the same since we had to move away.

Where I live now, it takes 15-20 minutes to drive to the grocery store, so it's only practical to shop once per week. Shopping is a big chore and a fight with traffic, not a nice walk. It means I need to dedicate more of my apartment to food storage and more of my time to meal planning. It's certainly not an efficiency gain for me personally. On the plus side, the large store does have 73 different flavors of potato chips.

How centralised the logistics are doesn't seem to me to be all that related to the size and number of the shops.

For example, here there's Tesco. But there's huge tescos, tiny ones in towns, tiny ones outside of towns, subsidiary companies like onestop that exclusively are smaller shops (we tend to call them "corner shops" here).

If anything, a larger central logistics "engine" behind it should make it much easier to pop up a new shop somewhere as most of the issues are solved and there's experience in doing it.

It does however make things more boring.

> the impending death of a society

A society. The old society. To be replaced by a new society that doesn't work like the old one.

The new society is evolving towards humans that behave like frogs: They're born in a certain area and don't roam too far from that original spot because everything they could ever want is available at their fingertips or only a hop away.

To be fair, this is the primary factor why frogs (anura) have "survived" with few changes for about 250 million years. Innumerable creatures have come and gone in that time yet frogs are still around. Not a bad evolutionary strategy if you ask me.

I think the point of the op was that the size of systemic shocks increases to the point where societal collapse is inevitable. Centralization decreases resilience and at a certain point the system can’t handle the standard changes the system will experience.

For a certain interpretation this was also true of the old society. The definition of "too far" is subjective.

The humans in WALL-E didn't move too far, either...

People are more mobile than ever. Everyone is flocking to big cities.

My guess is that People travel way more than in the last 50 years and department stores have nothing to do with experiencing a diverse life.

Maybe department stores are very different in the US, but I'm not sure how much social benefit we gain from having a buffer in the supply chain of expensive clothes, cosmetics and homewares.

Any inventory warehouse can choose how much inventory to stock. If it maintains, say, 1 month of monthly demand instead of 3 months, it is more likely to run out of inventory during a supply chain shock. The fragility of the system is more related to this aspect than to anything else.

Capitalism reinvents communism: many such cases.