Because scale breeds efficiencies. It should be obvious why WalMart is a better business model than the previous experience of shopping at 15 different stores to get the same stuff.
"Efficiency" is not a goal in itself, and it does not pass as an argument here.
1) Walmart may be a better "business model", but is it a better model for a society that we want to live? I surely don't want to live in a place where big box stores are the norm, and the only alternatives are crazy expensive "niche" stores. And I surely don't want to live in a world where the quality of my food is determined by Walmart's weight, who will favor products that can last longer, are cheaper to produce and are easier to store and transport - i.e, ultra processed crap. If the price to pay to have better groceries is the "inconvenience" that I will have to go to 2-3 separate shops, it's absolutely worth it and I'll gladly accept the "inefficiency".
2) Optimizing for efficiency is a recipe for systemic, catastrophic failures. Just as an example: think of the semi-weekly github outages that are happening. Everyone is convinced that the cost of paying for a SaaS is negligible compared to the cost of operating your own, so they don't even try to set up their own CI and code repository and have to pray everyday to make sure that will be able to work with it. Meanwhile, my self-hosted gitea/drone/docker repo has been running for almost 4 years already with no issues and it requires minimal maintenance. It took me some time initially to set things up in a way that I was satisfied, and it probably doesn't save me any money compared with a off-the-shelf solution, but thanks to my initial investment and willingness to accept these costs I am more resilient than any competitor.
3) Taken to an extreme, focusing on "efficiency" could be used to justify authoritarian governments and the most dystopian worlds. I really do not share this techno-utilitarian worldview that thinks that maximizing economic output can justify the existence of corporations that reduce us to nothing but consumers that can be placed in a segmented box. It's this worldview that is brought us Big Data, the invasion of our privacy, the "gamification" of everything, and so on. Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon may all be trillion-dollar companies and may have built incredible products, but the societal/environmental/civil cost is just too much to be worth it. If I knew in 2004 that by accepting the invite to 1GB of Gmail I would be contributing to the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism, I'd never had done it.
That's a lot of text to just say you don't trust the government or corporations. This argument is orthogonal
Of course efficiency is the goal. Wouldn't you argue our current use of natural resources is unsustainable long term? The only way out of that is to improve efficiency.
Ignore Walmart. If we were to rollback farming to the methods used just a few decades ago, the world would starve. So, yes, we need to continue to improve efficiency. It's required due to resources being limited.
> The only way out of that is to improve efficiency.
Or by stopping/reducing consumption of things that we don´t really need and have been shoved on us by the corporations. Stop focusing on the symptoms and focus on getting rid of the disease. Let's get rid of fast food, fast fashion, let North America abandon the failed experiment that is called "Suburbia" and get rid of its car dependency. Let's stop expecting overnight shipping for whatever stupid gadget we want to buy, etc...
If the US reduces its consumption to the average of the developed world, instead of having growth-addicted Corporations and Goverments pushing to make the rest of the world consume like the average American, I can bet that we can improve our overall quality of life even on a smaller GDP per capita.
Also, even if you disagree with that: the argument is not against "improving efficiency". The argument is against optimizing for it while ignoring other costs and especially ignoring the fact that most of these optimizations have diminishing returns. E.g: airline travel is something that has been optimized beyond imagination, but it will never be as sustainable as an economic activity as traveling by train or boats. Between trying to "optimize" air travel even more, I'd rather we just decided to ban short haul flights altogether and reallocated our resources to the (re-)construction of decent rail roads and passenger boats.
