The recent bankruptcy filing at Toys “R” Us has roiled the toy industry. Yet the struggles at the company are not new. The firm was taken private in a $6.6 billion leveraged private equity buyout in 2005, with the aim of turning the chain around, but the resulting debt has proved to be unserviceable.

The news is part of a larger trend of closings that some are calling the retail apocalypse. The rise of e-commerce, combined with a shift in consumer preference toward dining out over shopping and with years of overbuilding, has made for distinctly unattractive economics in traditional retail.

Take a closer look, however, and the prevailing narrative isn’t quite what it seems. Amazon has made a big push into physical retail, capped off by its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods. Other firms with large digital presences, ranging from Apple to Warby Parker, have moved into physical stores. So, clearly, the problem isn’t with retail itself but with the inability of legacy firms to adapt to a new model.

As Darrell Rigby argued in a 2011 HBR article, every 50 years the retail industry goes through a major disruption. The rise of urban centers led to department stores. Automobiles created suburbs and shopping malls. Toys “R” Us emerged in a wave of category killers and discount stores that arose in the 1950s and 1960s.

Then, as now, economics were shifting abruptly. As families moved out to the suburbs, and interstate highways improved distribution and logistics, a single location focused on a particular product area made a lot of sense. Massive big-box stores, providing lower prices and greater selection, crushed small-scale retailers in town squares and shopping malls.

This is the environment in which Toys “R” Us thrived. Most people of a certain age today remember the thrill of a visit to the endless aisles of wonderful things, each box promising hours of fabulous play. The local toy store seemed positively drab in comparison. Parents, for their part, were drawn by the “everyday low price.”

Today retail is in the process of being reinvented once again, and Toys “R” Us has failed to keep up, as economics in the industry have shifted against it. Now, those endless aisles pale in comparison with what’s available online, and rock-bottom prices can be found at Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

On a more fundamental level, the challenge for retailers like Toys “R” Us is that the basic function of a physical location has changed. Traditionally, stores were optimized for driving transactions. Cash registers were plentiful and easy to find, and success was measured with metrics like sales per square foot and average size of transaction.

Yet now a transaction can happen anyplace, at any time. From sitting at the kitchen table to waiting for a train, consumers have the power to browse, compare prices, and order from thousands of retailers competing for their attention. The attraction of endless aisles has been replaced by the thrill of instant gratification. Today physical locations need to do something more.

To understand the shift, just walk into your nearest Apple store, where you will find a limited selection of products and no cash registers. Walk in, and you are greeted by an actual person, who has been trained to answer your questions and offer advice. The experience is far more high-touch than high-tech.

The reason that Apple stores look as they do is they are not designed solely to drive transactions — they’re designed to do everything that can’t be done online, such as build relationships, offer service, solve problems, and upsell.

Apple isn’t alone. A number of successful online retailers are becoming increasingly focused on the physical world, for a number of reasons. For example, Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods gives it a much more comprehensive distribution footprint, which will help it increase the efficiency of its online model.

A more interesting development — one more pertinent to the challenges Toys “R” Us is facing — is the emergence of “shoppable showrooms.” At places like Bonobos Guide Shops and J. Hilburn’s “The Studio,” customers can get fitted, consult a stylist, and process returns, just like in a standard store, but these locations don’t stock any inventory, which allows for smaller locations and saves on costs. Nordstrom is now testing a similar concept.

Imagine if Toys “R” Us followed this model by opening up small playrooms where parents could bring their kids off to test a revolving selection of the latest toys. You can imagine how their little darlings would be begging them to order the toy that had delighted them for the past hour. With traditional physical locations serving as a distribution center, same-day delivery could be arranged at minimal cost.

Yet instead of going high-touch, Toys “R” Us has opted for high-tech, rolling out new features like Find It Fast, to let customers see which stores had which toys, and using the loyalty program for better targeted ads and better product life cycle management. None of these ideas are necessarily bad, but they fail to address the shifting economics of retail. Rather, they seek to optimize a failing model.

In their 2005 book, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne popularized the notion of a blue ocean strategy, which focuses on new markets, rather than fighting it out in “red oceans” filled with rabid competition. As MIT professor David Robertson points out, however, the current retail environment is neither a red nor a blue ocean, but more like a dead sea, killing off existing life but providing a new ecosystem in which different organisms can thrive.

He gives the example of Lego’s Discovery Centers. A typical location is set up in an empty department store, and features miniature versions of some the same attractions that can be found at the toy giant’s amusement parks. The strategy gives Lego a strong negotiating position with mall owners who are in dire need to fill the space.

Other retailers are taking advantage of the shifting economics of retail to experiment with pop-up shops, which can be used to test new concepts or to provide a larger footprint during key time periods. With commercial landlords far more flexible these days, some merchants are learning to love the retail apocalypse.

So, what we can learn from Toys “R” Us’s failure to adapt is that the answer to disruption is not to double down on a failing model or to try to get better and better at things people care about less and less. It’s to shift your efforts to something they want more. Value never disappears — it just moves to another place.