Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.
One of the funniest to me was that the architect didn't like the forced shopping path of modern airports. So he just didn't add any. And no-one noticed until after they'd built the foundations, so then they added a new floor, but it would be out of the way so who'd want to go there reducing income forecasts, while requiring new ventilation requirements, fire suppression systems etc.
If you work on poorly defined constantly changing software tasks it's all quite familiar. Just with a literal airport.
What makes it double funny is the whole security theater around being unable to carry certain items during flight (due to risk of explosives, for example). A determined person would probably be able to craft some makeshift explosives with things one can buy at the taxfree shop.
You would be very unlikely to be able to create an explosive, since there's not a lot of chemistry supplies for sale, but it's trivial to build/buy a weapon to attempt to take over the plane, and the threat has been demonstrated at least once that I know of.
Like almost all airport security since 9/11, preventing people from bringing weapons onto a plane is almost meaningless. Sure, you could hurt and kill passengers and flight attendants, but you could do that kind of terrorism anywhere. It won't bring down the plane, and as long as the cockpit door stays closed you will never hijack the plane.
1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy.
2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident.
3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area.
4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
I don’t have any problem with the IKEA layout, the experience is almost part of what you are going for. But it is obviously designed to make you take longer paths to things.
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
But for airlines, I seem to recall servicing KCI was expensive. I think more than once, various airlines left or threatened to leave due to the high fees, which affected ticket prices. Fees which could not be offset by charging vendors the typical enormous rental prices. The new security barriers prevented much of the already limited foot traffic.
DHS also didn't like the proximity to the curb, and threatened to close the airport. A new design was sought (and ended up being partly designed by a friend of mine), and so now the new one follows the typical pattern: funnel everybody into far-too-few security check points (always leaving some unmanned), then into a large concourse with lots of expensive ways to spend money.
Seems that people are more willing to pay airport markup while waiting, than to pay higher ticket prices.