Brick and mortar (bricks and mortar or B&M) in its most simplest usage is used to describe the physical presence of a building(s) or other structure. It's a concept usually referred to in business, which applies to the physical location for a business or organisation.
The term brick and mortar business (bricks and mortar business or B&M business) is often used to refer to a company that possesses a building or store for operations.[1] The name is a metonym derived from the traditional building materials associated with physical buildings — bricks and mortar. Its first use was in 1992.[2]
More specifically, in the jargon of online eCommerce businesses, brick and mortar businesses are companies that have a physical presence and offer face-to-face customer experiences. This term is usually used to contrast with a transitory business or an internet-only presence, such as an online shop, which have no physical presence for shoppers to visit and buy from directly, though such online businesses normally have non-public physical facilities from which they either run business operations from, and/or warehousing for mass physical product storage and distribution.[3]
An example would be the movie-rental shop Blockbuster Video, which has physical stores and is in competition with the newer online rental services offered by Netflix. In this sense, the term is also a retronym in that most stores had a physical presence before the advent of the Internet. However the term is also applicable when contrasting businesses with physical presence and those that operated strictly in an order-by-mail capacity, pre-Internet.