Yes, malls already make the bathrooms and food hard to find because they know that everybody needs those, and making you search for them increases your chance o

Yes, malls already make the bathrooms and food hard to find because they know that everybody needs those, and making you search for them increases your chance of buying something on the way. If the malls knew which "store transitions" were most popular, they would definitely try to maximize their length. Simple objective function for the mall: maximize the sum over all paths of the path length times the number of people who took that path.