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How stores that pack online orders drain the life from a busy street

Big-box stores are shifting toward packing online orders instead of serving walk-in shoppers. Neighboring businesses end up losing the foot traffic

Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

On any given weekday in Brooklyn, a shopper can walk into a Target $TGT and pass employees who will never ring anyone up, point toward an aisle, or see their faces at all. Oftentimes they're too busy working to fulfill an online order.

Of a given store's roughly 160 workers, half of them spend their shifts pulling items off shelves and packing them for pickup or delivery, turning a place originally built for shoppers into one that no longer works for the people walking through the door.

Target reportedly handles roughly 80% of its web orders out of its own stores, and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley's Labor Center describe a broader move across the industry in which chains treat their locations as dispersed mini-warehouses, shifting labor away from the sales floor and toward back-room picking, packing, and processing returns. The building stays open, but the work inside shifts to filling orders that leave by van rather than serving customers who arrive on foot.

The volume driving that shift is now large enough to measure against........

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