There are a few airports (principally in Asia) who do this. It is amazing the benefits given
There are some in Europe too, and they all stand out for the time it takes to get into the boarding gate area.
The system works badly for all the reasons given by Atlantean; there's one such airport where the queues for the gates becomes intermingled, although for the life of me I can't remember which one! But I can see the scenes of chaos in my mnd's eye now.
There's another which happens to combine this security system with relatively frequent gate changes, for some reason; the only thing to do then is sit down and watch the fun for a minute or twenty, then go through the new gate last. Then of course there's a two-hour delay waiting for the new slot, then FTL cuts in, then.......you know the routine.
Now I'm here, a word on terminal design; airports exist to transfer passengers and cargo as expeditously as possible between air and the other modes of transport.
They have no other purpose whatsoever.
Their transformation in the mid-1980's into shopping malls began, to its shame, with the BAA, under the excuse that the extra revenue would allow them to keep airport charges down. This was never, ever, true. The retailers never-the-less took charge, and now new airports are designed by BAA and many others to serve primarily as shopping malls, not to move passengers quickly. (I worked for BAA in the 1980s and became very unpopular by refusing to agree that increasing "dwell time" was a desirable objective for BAA to have. I got nowhere and had to quit.)
In the early part of this century, I obtained a costing for a design and build" terminal in UK of 3,500m
2 capable of 1m passengers a year and, more importantly a "30th busiest hour" flow of 500 each way, with comfortable waiting/catering for an additional 500 in serious delay situations. Up to and including the structure, relocatable internal partitions and doors, aircon/heating, lighting, plumbing incl fully fitted washrooms everywhere, and decorative finishes, the quoted total cost was £2.25m. The required standard was "B&Q Megastore" in style and finish. The comparable cost of a BAA-commissioned 1m passenger building would have been about 500 times as much. The difference is largely due to the fact that the "B&Q" building provided for essential retail outlets and catering only, placed out of the main flow paths. (And no architect was involved promoting a grandiose design; the structure was a standard one.)
What has happened at many airports is that the retail outlets demand huge areas of space, which is either taken from passenger movement space or added to it. If the latter, there is then an additional contstruction cost which is never, ever justified by the additional net profit
to the airport that it generates. BAA and others, encouraged by architects and retailers, have suffered since the '80s and still suffer from the delusion that the retail contributes to their business. When every single factor is considered this is clearly nonsense.
There are many economic benefits that stem from speeding up passenger flows by a factor of 2 or 3, just one of those being that you then need half or even a third of the space you would need with a lot of retail. It isn't just the shops' space you save. With faster flows and thus fewer people waiting you need much smaller departure areas.
It should never take more than 15 minutes to get from the concourse to the gate. With old-style check-in gates disappearing, multiple self-service
fast bag-drops (NB not check-in desks disguised as bag drops) and little retail, distances will be shorter and unobstructed. Passengers need only be given a latest time to arrive at the gate, as happens now with many airlines, about 20 minutes before STD.
There is no law of nature that says airports must provide space for "designer-label" shops selling over-priced tat to gullible fools who could buy it cheaper in the High St. That includes the myth of "Duty Free" goods; most airports' mark-ups result in a price that's higher than the High St price for duty-paid goods.
Mind you, accepting that security is with us for ever, it's time that new-build terminals recognised that and installed security systems that do not create queues, even at peak times. IE, 3 or 4 times the present provisions of space, equipment and staff, perhaps more.
I hope that I have encouraged you to research the economics of terminals with a bare minimum of retail, designed for passenger transfer and nothing else. You may find that the net cost per passenger is much less without the "contribution" from retail.