The camera shop, staffed by people who knew their onions, was a very useful resource. But its demise started long before the Internet, with the huge marketing mistake that allowed big buyers to buy from manufacturers at lower prices than could little shops. What madness! The manufacturers would have sold the same number of items at the same price, whether from a mega-store or a local one-man operation. The only retail price advantage a mega should have had was from its own, internal economies of scale, not from unfair selling by the manufacturers.
I chose to buy all my camera stuff locally, despite the existence of several huge, postal dealerships in Leeds and London who could have saved me a few miserable quid. In the event of a failure, how nice to go back to the local shop and hand over the product, the solution then up to the shopkeeper and the reps. Imagine: no repacking, insuring, visits to the post office!
As with so much that ails society, it's rooted in pure, bloody greed. We bring these things upon ourselves.