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There's a big reason why the Internet has come along and so easily taken 10 - maybe 20 - percent of overall retail sales in many individual product categories, including a whole bunch in home.

Because traditional in-store retailers let them.

You can offer all sorts of reasons why online has been so successful and why many people predict it will account for as much as a third of all retail sales by the end of the decade.

But the real reason is the one nobody wants to talk about: if physical stores had been doing a better job of retailing, shoppers would not have flocked to the internet in the numbers they have.

Think about it: Internet shoppers buy online for a number of reasons, but many of them have more to do with ease of the buying process than necessarily price.

Buying online is easy. Buying in a store often isn't because retailers purposely make it difficult to shop their stores with odd adjacencies, high shelves and other customer-unfriendly tactics.

Customer service is ubiquitous online. Customer service is mostly just a concept in physical stores where salespeople are scarce, often poorly informed and sometimes just downright rude.

Merchandise is almost always in stock online. Merchandise levels are wildly inconsistent in stores and a shopper going to a specific store for a specific item never really knows if they will find it on the shelves, especially for products with multiple sizes and/or colors.

Pricing is generally consistent online. Pricing is a moving target in physical stores where shoppers must navigate an ever-changing melange of coupons, discount cards, one-day sales and other high-low shenanigans that only serve to confuse and ultimately alienate many customers.

Checking out online is usually a click or two away. Checking out in stores can be a physically - not to mention emotionally - draining process that often involves long lines, longer waits and dysfunctional computers.

Is any of this exaggeration to serve making a point? Maybe. And is any of this the obvious differences inherent in the real versus shopping experiences? Sure.

But all of this makes the point that physical stores let online shopping come in and kick their retailing butts. They constantly and continually looked for ways to cut corners and make the purchasing process less customer friendly and more burdensome for the sake of quarterly earnings.

Even more indicting, physical stores took whatever obvious advantages they had and for the most part failed to exploit them to their benefit.

Everyone talks about experiential as the single most important element of consumerism going forward and as the built-in advantage physical stores have over online. Yet, how many retailers are using this tool to get shoppers into their stores? How many have created environments exciting enough to make someone leave the comfort of their keyboard and physically go to a store? The answer is not pretty.

Remember when Bloomingdale's came to prominence with its retail-as-theater persona during the glory Marvin Traub era? Or when Macy's created The Cellar, forever changing the nature of housewares retailing? Even go way back to the first Santa Claus Christmas experiences at every downtown department store in America.

Those were experiences and yes, they still exist, but the bar is so very much higher.

Physical stores let online take away their business. They are the only ones who can get some of it back.

(And speaking of back, it's good to be so in HFN.)