I got a buddy who works for DSCO, a company which, among other things, sells software that makes it easy for brick-and-mortar stores to sell products online and have the products ship from the retailer's warehouses. Around the time of the pandemic, they change their software so that the stores themselves would look like warehouses to the software. That way, they could ship from any of these so-called warehouses and then support ship-from-store on the websites of their customers. This functionality was sort of in in demand before the pandemic, but many potential customer said "no thanks, we'll build it ourselves". After the pandemic hit, everyone went scrambling to DSCO for help to support ship-from-store.
This article seems to talk about the next logical step away from ship-from-store: turn the store into a shipping yard.
This article seems to talk about the next logical step away from ship-from-store: turn the store into a shipping yard.