retail stocks to buy

As consumers do less shopping in physical stores and more shopping on the Internet, retail stocks will need to evolve or face extinction.

And if tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen is right, they don't have much time. In an interview with PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy, the co-founder of Netscape and renowned Silicon Valley venture capitalist unabashedly predicted the demise of brick-and-mortar stores by the end of the decade.

"Retail guys are going to go out of business and ecommerce will become the place everyone buys. You are not going to have a choice," Andreessen said. "Malls are going under, and there's more to come. These chains are much closer to going under than you think."

He reasons that the superior business model of online retailing will undermine brick-and-mortar rivals.

"Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there's a viable alternative," he says. "You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20% to 30% in revenues. It just doesn't make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves. There is fundamentally a better model."

As extreme as it sounds, the transition is already well under way in some retail categories.

Online retailer Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) played a major role in undermining the business of two of the country's largest bookstore chains, Borders, which went out of business in 2011, and Barnes and Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS), which recently announced plans to close a third of its stores over the next decade.

And the popularity of online video streaming such as that offered by Netflix Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX) torpedoed video rental giant Blockbuster, which filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and was eventually bought by Dish Network Corp. (Nasdaq: DISH).