> I’d like to keep money in my community, but ...
It sounds to me like Amazon is not better at every aspect, you've identified one aspect right there. They are competing on, "Would you rather live in a cookie cutter franchise strip mall or a mom and pop commercial area?"
I'm willing to accept some inefficiencies and some frustrations if it means I've got a nice neighborhood of mom and pop stores.
i don't want to live in what's essentially a theme park full of fake stores that only exist because it makes the neighbourhood seem nicer, or where the shopkeepers are basically paid entertainers present for their aesthetic value. if that's the sort of city we're building, let's skip the inefficiency of paying local retailers to provide the service of existing and go right to universal income.
paying people to work in shops that are worse in every way than the alternative except for being local is not productive. no real value is being created. it's a make-work scheme, and paying those workers to not work would be more efficient.
The ruthless pursuit of efficiency as it's own goal is a trap. Squeezing out every societal optimization is a very engineering centric mindset. There are many, many times where the most efficient solution to a problem isn't the "best" one, and we need to collectively get better at recognizing when that's the case.