It may sound boring, but the process of moving merchandise from a distribution center to a store to the shelf where we can buy it seems very nuanced and complex. I would love to know more about how this was developed over the years as well as other aspects of brick and mortar store evolution.
Sam Walton's Made in America book is a great read. It's not a true history of retail in America, but it offers great insight into the transition towards self service retail from 1945-1990. If you don't mind me asking, where did you develop in interest in retail history?
Here's a smattering; throughout the vast majority of these you will find a keen attention to the spaces and business practices that allowed retail to develop. There's actually an interesting book or article I once read that talked about how the evolution of sales spaces and the evolution of museum design worked hand-in-hand in the 19th century, which is just super fascinating, but I can't recall the author or title right now. The advent of window dressing, self-serve groceries, and the business realization that fast turnover can compensate for narrow profit margins through volume are all fascinating stories within this list!
Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis : New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Hoganson, Kristin L. Consumers’ Imperium : The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Lair, Meredith H. Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War. 1 edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Leach, William R. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. 1st Vintage Books Ed. Vintage, 1994.
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed : The Making of the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic : The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2003).
Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress : American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise : Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, 1st Vintage Books Ed (Vintage, 1994).
Michael B Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).
EDIT: Some more physical examinations might include:
Richard W Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.
EDIT EDIT also, for the structure of business, I would check out Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.