I always felt at home in malls until I was in my early 20's when I started to grow into other ways of living and consuming. I've been to the Mall of America many hundreds of times in my life. During high school my friends and I went there several times a week to play video games at the arcade and check out the girls, and my first post-college job was right across the street so I often ate lunch there. Here is an aerial pic of the mall (stolen from google maps):

There really are alpacas where I show them to be, by the way. Very odd to see farm animals across the street from a semiconductor fab.

The Mall of America is a fairly vibrant place. Lots of people going about their business, chatting with each other, yelling at their kids, just normal daily life. Now days I simply prefer the cafe on the street (and the streets themselves) for my urban spiritual experiences and material consumption. It's nothing more than a personal preference.  

The malls that scare me are the banal, older malls in a lot of American suburbs. Sparsely populated both in people and stores and handicapped with pitiful architecture, they are a microcosm of dying cities. If they are located in actual dying cities, the body language of the inhabitants reflects it. It is difficult to observe.

you are the media you consume.