Urban commercial activity shifted indoors in part through vendor licensing controls

Evidence

While retail buying and selling remains very much a public activity, it has largely been moved indoors, off the streets and walkways. Certainly much of this movement is due to technological innovations, economic pressures, and the general rationalization of business, but the practice of licensing, and thereby controlling the numbers of street vendors, was undoubtedly of some import as well. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 371