Reddit mentions of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (Anchor Books)

The Bataan Death Mall has always seemed dead to me. I used to go there when it was the only theater I could get to without a bus transfer, but seriously, it's a piece of real estate development that breaks every rule of real estate development. (See Joel Garreau's excellent, and fun to read, book on the subject, Edge City.)

The developers were trying to do something interesting and experimental. Since anchor stores are dying, they tried to replace anchor stores with sports-themed family entertainment attractions, like the Nascar area and the ice skating rink, hoping they'd attract as much foot traffic to the smaller stores as Famous Barr and Sears used to. Not so much. In no small part because, contrary to their early predictions, nobody lives near there or works near there, it's not anybody's "nearby mall."

Also, the need to set aside as much horizontal space as they did for the sports attractions meant breaking the most important rule of real estate development in America: no American will voluntarily walk farther than 660 feet from their car. Mall developers learned ages ago that you can trick them into walking 1,000 feet, but only if it's in a visually stimulating environment (which the Mills isn't) and, more importantly, not in a straight line so they can't see how far they'll have to walk.

The Mills is laid out as two long corridors that only connect at the ends; if you're trying to get from a store on one side to a store on the opposite side, it's every bit of what, half a mile? More? Mall developers learned the hard way, over 50 years ago, that if an American looks at a map of the mall and concludes that they have to walk farther than 660 feet to get to the next store they want to go to, they'll double back to their car and drive around to the nearest entrance. Except that they won't; once they're in their car, half of them decide to just go home instead. (They also won't go down, or up, more than one escalator, which is why every successful mall is three stories tall with the entrance on the 2nd floor.)

tl;dr: If anything was going to save the Mills from its horrible layout, it would have been for the sports- and exercise-themed attractions to become so popular that they attracted huge permanent crowds. That didn't happen.