I hear people talk about this all the time and I know I am guilty of it too:

1. Go into a store to check out a product in person or try it on.

2. Leave and buy it cheaper online.

I try not to. Sometimes it's because the store doesn't have the exact color or model I want. Sometimes the point in time when I'm shopping happens to not be when I'm ready to buy and when I am ready, it's a hassle to go back to the store. But sometimes it's just being lazy and cheap.

I'm surprised the article didn't mention an obvious (but extremely difficult) answer:

1. Levy taxes on online retail companies. Scale so that the larger the business is and the greater the fraction of their business is online, the higher the tax.

2. Use that to subsidize or lower the taxes on smaller, in-person focused businesses.

Taxes are the single best lever we have to architect incentivizes to improve the world for the public. It's a shame that government and politics in the US is so broken that we can't really use it effectively.