All it takes is the big box stores to setup camp 10 minutes outside of town and almost everyone with a car will opt to save money and shop there.
I remember quite good prices in the Netherlands as well which is quite densely populated and where people shop in downtown stores rather than out of town big box stores. The exception would be things like hardware and furniture.
Sure, if you want a big electronics store, you go to the centre of the city (10m biking), but for groceries, coffee, takeaways, restaurants, doctors, DIY stores, pharmacies, etc there's tons of these scattered around the city. It's quite multi-polar, there are many shopping streets, for these kinds of needs you're rarely more than 10 min walk or 2-3 minutes cycle away from those.
Where I live, for example, there's even 2 branches of the same chain of supermarket within about 400m, so <5 min walk, about 1 min on a bike. (Handy on the rare occasion that one of them is out of something!)
They very well might work in a downtown, but I have yet to see it in the US.
But you see it in Europe. I walk to lidl and buy my groceries, basically every person I know walk to get groceries. Some do big weekend shopping trips now and then to bigger stores, but that isn't the norm.
In the US, these are few and far between. And Aldi/Lidl are going to optimize for their costs, which means not paying rent in a downtown if they have the option to build on cheaper land 5 minutes away from downtown. Which makes no difference to them, because 99% of their customers have a car.
It's pretty similar to the way medium sized Safeways are spread throughout San Francisco, except the rent isn't $3000/month for a 1 bed and the soap and shampoo doesn't have to be kept locked away.
One thing I hate about the majority of the US's urban centers is they are extremely touristy and expensive. It is common to be paying $6+ per beer (it's local but still) and that's not even on weekends.
It's kind of similar to how good shoes can be resoled.
And I thought that's just the way things are.
But I got a Hoover upright, which was much cheaper, looks cheaper, like a toy, mostly garish purple plastic, and is also much heavier. But it sucks up an order of magnitude more dirt. It's bagless, which some people don't like, but it makes it very visible how much crud it's removing and allows it to be dumped after every use.
So I feel like the Oreck was perhaps a swindle, having the looks and characteristics that older people associate with appliances from long ago, except the actual performance.
And I'm glad I didn't spend a lot on a Dyson just to get a vacuum with no bag.
I've never gone there, but I think there's a storefront near me that says they repair vacuum cleaners. Don't recall what kind.
If there is retail, it's _highly_ differentiated from Big Box.