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.