In exchange for people staying home, and going to their local suburb's Target and Walmart to buy a sandwich, or go to a Starbucks. Get their nails done in a local chain stripmall place.
It's odd to suggest that people spending their money closer to home means shopping at large chain businesses, but spending downtown doesn't. Just because there isn't a Walmart in the city's corporate center doesn't mean you're patronizing Mom and Pop small businesses. You think that trendy gastropub with its gourmet hamburgers, cute waitresses that all share a suspiciously similar alt aesthetic, and tables full of people clad in business casual isn't a line item in some investment firm's portfolio?
Guess where the Mom and Pops are? They're in that "stripmall place" near your house.
That's not where they are though. You see it, too. Those stripmalls are all dead-dead-dead. The only business is at the shopping centers and megastores.
I can tell you where they most definitely aren't, though: downtown. Anybody who can afford that real estate is not the little guy. If they appear to be, that just means great effort (and money) was expended to create that image.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
While I think it's true that a lot of businesses have shifted to being more neighborhood-local and not relying on "business hours" to be sustainable, the reality for most suburban economies are that shopping centers and chain megastores basically absorb all the business. Places like Target, Whole Foods, Walmart are the ones that are primarily benefiting from this overnight migration outside of city centers. But that's been going on for a long time, COVID just accelerated it.