Offering some recommendations, Dr. Eliot indicates that it is not all doom-and-gloom. Stores can survive and thrive by reshaping the shopper experience, he says. "Retailers need to think about how to make their stores into an immersive experience that grabs the shopper and gets them into an in-store buying mode. Shoppers in the on-demand economy are propelled by the 'now,' and will indeed make a purchase on-the-spot if the store makes it abundantly easy to do so."

Dr. Eliot adds that "Stores can use digital technology to allow a shopper to make a purchase wherever they are in the store, using a mobile POS on a store clerk's tablet, enabling impulse purchases, and avoiding delays for shoppers who may be turned off by a long line at the register and abandon their buying. Retailers can also use in-store beacons to track the movement of the shopper and prompt a purchase by sending an alert that appears on the shoppers' smartphone, urging the shopper to buy an item in that aisle to get a 10% discount or maybe some precious bonus loyalty points."

He points out that conventional “taxi companies were slow to adjust to Uber's entry, and completely out-of-touch when it came to using digital technology."

He warns retailers to not “get caught under an Uber wave that wipes out your brick-and-mortar stores, [but to] instead fight fire-with-fire, by adopting technology that matches the behavior of the on-demand economy and makes your store the perfect environment for attracting shoppers. Savvy brick-and-mortar retailers use the double punch of real-world store and on-line digital capabilities to beat the on-line only stores."

He says that "Those retailers that have their head in the sand and are not adopting digital technology will soon be gone. They will have been Ubered out of business.”