If I were a LCS right now I'd be pretty nervous about all of this AND I'd be especially attentive to me regular crowd.
To be fair, I doubt it'll actually impact the stores much unless they don't treat their regulars well. I mean, let's face facts, comic readers are creatures of habit. How many of us (a fairly well-educated and self-restrained crowd, from what I can tell) made the ritual weekly trek to the shop to buy an armload of comics that we probably really weren't going to read, because the titles had dropped in quality years back?
I'm embarrassed to say so, but I probably bought new comics three or four years after I stopped enjoying them, and another couple after I stopped reading.
What can I do to make my shop more attractive than any online experience? Is it even possible to compete?
I think it's entirely possible, but it needs to center around not giving "cool kids," mothers, and girlfriends a reason to think they'll be kidnapped and sold into slavery if they go in. That means natural light and a clear enough space that you can see the back of the shop from the street. It also means dialing the misogyny down to around a three and throwing out the T&A posters.
(Related: Go to your local drug store and walk through the cosmetics aisle. Notice that nothing worth buying is on a shelf below the waist or above the head. Follow that logic, because men don't really like having their rear ends exposed to foot traffic, either.)
After you stop scaring people away, you can sell, and I think this is where the digital comics do much more good than harm: Put a big TV in the front window with a computer showing (good, fun) pages from the week's comics, then flip the store around so that the high-ticket items are in back and the comics are up front.
(Hint: Sears puts the men's section in a back corner so that wives will be tempted to buy themselves something on the way in and on the way out. Someone off the street isn't going to be tricked into buying action figures and video games when he came in because the Captain America movie piqued his interest. However, the other way around has a pretty good chance of working.)
The racks themselves should be, y'know, helpful, rather than assuming everybody has memorized the Diamond solicitations for the month. By which I mean print out the damned solicitation and post it next to the comic so that Timmy knows that this is part seventy-nine of eighty-three and Carol Burnett makes a cameo appearance. It might also be a good idea to have another screen with more in-depth previews of the books and where to find related material (back issues, paperbacks, movies, whatever, and whether they're in inventory).
Along similar lines, ditch the cash register for a computer system that tracks sales so your salesdweeb can play Amazon: "Hey, cool book. Did you know that a bunch of our customers who read this also grab Honey Han the Hen Hunter? I'll give you a discount if you want to try it out."
I'm not making this all up, by the way. Some of it's common sense. Some of it comes from Paco Underhill's books (if you ever sell or design anything for selling, read them), but I actually used to go to a highly successful comic shop in a mall. Not an open-air strip mall, but an actual, indoor, big-haired kids loitering at the entrance mall. The design wasn't too far from what I'm describing, less the video support. Great layout with everything accessible and a great staff.
It was sad to watch the place die off. Someone bought them out along with a few video game stores and tried to merge the gaming into the comic store. They (of course) pushed the comics to the back, and turned down the lights, but with a dedicated video game place two doors down, that was just stupid, so, of course, they phased out the comics, then closed a couple months later. Brilliant!
(The pretty young woman managing the place was probably a factor, too, of course. She knew the solicitations every which way, I think, and was really good at "name that comic" when a confused customer came in, usually having it ordered for said customer within a week. But someone like her isn't exactly an option for most stores, I realize. And before anybody asks, she's since gotten married to a nice archaeologist who was very disappointed that he wasn't allowed to fight Nazis.)