Lots of shops have gone out of business because, by having a premises, their operating expenses were more than an online retailer, so places like Amazon could undercut them, and their customers were willing to wait for delivery to save some money. It doesn't take that many customers leaving before you've got to put up prices to cover your overheads, and that just makes more customers leave, and after a couple of decades of online retail being common, you're left with far fewer physical shops.

I do try to buy from local stores first, but sometimes they just don't have the item I'm looking for. Physical stores only have so much shelf space and can only stock more frequently purchased goods, leaving pretty big gaps that only large online retailers like Amazon can fill, unfortunately :(

I do agree with the previous poster though, local stores should always come first.