I was with BAA, at a relatively fairly senior level, when it was transformed from an engineering based provider of airport services which understood aviation, to a shopping mall with a captive footfall.
We were all expected to learn the language and customs of large scale retailing, and used random buzz-word generators to hold our own in planning meetings.
I was shouted at more than once for failing to realise that a very important Key Performance Indicator for anyone in charge of a terminal, or indeed an airport,
was the increase in "dwell-time" that you had achieved by one means or another. Increase in "dwell-time" correlated closely, as you might expect, with increase in "spending per passenger" (aka "shopper") which is why the bean-counters wanted the "dwell time" to be increased.
Airlines cooperated by telling people to turn up far earlier than necessary in the deluded hope that BAA's promises of consequently lower charges would be fulfilled.
That was 25 years or so ago, and it has gone from bad to worse ever since. A modern airport manager would laugh uncontrollably if you said that the function of a terminal is to transfer passengers expeditiously and efficiently from one mode of transport to another, with no barriers whatsoever to movement other than those required by law, eg Customs and Security.
The whole idea is to confront a shopper with physically unavoidable shopping opportunities until he or she cracks, and to make sure that he or she has so much time to waste that everyone, eventually, surrenders and buys some piece of over-priced "Duty-Free" tat that sells in the High Street for a fraction of the price paid in the airport, and on which no Duty is payable in the first place, or is not "Duty-Free" within the EU.