Nearby, Six Acres' warming red brick interior is hard to leave on Vancouver's frequent rainy days.

BBC: Drinking in Vancouver��s historic Gastown district

Online retailers are particularly smart at this, and have given many established brick and mortar competitors a hard time with their ability to analyze consumer sentiment, take suitable action, and elicit positive recommendations from their enormous online audience.

FORBES: Now that data's going really big, what's next?

And it was in Bandera that the Great Western Trail began, and with it the cult of the cowboy: 300, 000 head of longhorn cattle, most rustled from Mexico, herded through its broad main street every year in the 1870s and '80s, a last staging post to stock up on liquor and chilli brick before the long, hard ride to Dodge City, Kansas.

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Brick and mortar retailers are finding it hard to compete against online retailers like Amazon and eBay.

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"We've been trying ever so hard but we've been banging our head against a brick wall, " Le Tissier told BBC Radio Solent.

BBC: Pinnacle pulls out of Saints bid

Brick Township and Toms River, which were hit hard by Superstorm Sandy, issued voluntary evacuation orders for areas still recovering from that storm.

WSJ: A state-by-state look at the Northeast blizzard

IBM's "brick" initiative which creates data storage farms out of cheap blocks of hard discs and the broader push for "blade" servers that make adding computer power easy to add were evidence of this move to commoditisation, said Mr Findlay.

BBC: Why the future will be easier to use

As I watched them walk past a Confederate monument and enter an orange-brick building where African-Americans in the 1960s were arrested for demanding equal voting rights, it was hard not to see the parallels.

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