This just came up here.
Why do so many businesses, like your local 7-11 for instance, that have double doors seem to keep one of the two locked? What’s the point of that? Anybody?
Often, one door is locked to prevent people from opening it in high wind conditions.
Yup, that’s why they do it here in Oklahoma (where the wind comes sweeping off the plains).
On a gusty day here, the wind will yank a door out of your hand and break it.
Also, having both doors unlocked in windy conditions tends to mean that they never really close. The wind pressure will almost always keep them a little open.
When I worked night shift at a convenience store (in Oklahoma, by the way), the push-to-exit door was the “beer door.” The theory was that if someone was dashing out with a case of beer in his right hand, his first instinct is shove that door to exit. Strangely enough, it worked a couple of times. It was kind of satisfying to see the culprit bounce off the door a couple of times, freak out, drop the beer, and finally work out that he had to pull to exit.
I see it in all conditions though.
They have two doors to aid deliveries (most small stores don’t have truck docks, and a dolly full of merch is hard to maneuver through a single door).
Otherwise they keep one of them locked for a variety of reasons, including the wind thing, traffic control, loss prevention, attempting to keep maintenance and repair costs down, or one of the doors is already malfunctioning so they just lock it rather than get it fixed.
“locked for a variety of reasons, including the wind thing, traffic control, loss prevention, attempting to keep maintenance and repair costs down, or one of the doors is already malfunctioning so they just lock it rather than get it fixed.”
these do not seem reasonable explanations other than the wind theory. Traffic control? Two people entering in 1.5 seconds rather than not quite a second will accomplish ? Although with manners the way they are it can mean that traffic will stack up inside door as people enter. Loss prevention? Shoplifters can exit one door as well as the other and generally people only open one door at a time. maintenance and repair costs? A door used twice as often will wear out twice as fast.
Oftentimes the door lock that the key unlocks just locks one door to the other, while one of the doors has sliding bolts that lock it to the floor and ceiling to make everything secure. This means when you unlock the door, only one door will open unless you take the extra effort to disengage the bolts on the other door. If the employee who opens doesn’t know to do this, (or just can’t be bothered) you end up with one door that opens and the other that doesn’t.
Earlier thread. Personally, I think it’s often just “That’s just the way we do things,” without any thought given to wind, traffic, etc.
If you only have a couple people coming into the store it doesn’t make any difference. If you have 200 people trying to come into the store, you’d really rather them not pour in all at once.
See Post #4.
Not necessarily. Often the “open” door is fitted with sturdier hardware than the “locked” one, and if it needs repair, you only have to pay for the one door.
Additionally, you lose a lot more heat/AC with two doors opening and closing than one.
I’ve always assumed it was because they were to lazy to open the other door.
I’ve often wondered if this violates some fire laws by inhibiting an emergency exit.
Probably 90% of the cases. Spinning a key in a lock is easy; flipping those damned secondary latches is hard on new doors and will take your fingertips off on old, dirty, worn ones.
That, with weather and security issues filling in the gaps, is probably the whole of it.
Alternately, the owners might not want to have to worry about the closer forgetting about it. An incompetent minimum-wage closer might remember to lock the key lock, but forget to first flip the secondary latches closed, and so leave the doors in a state where you can pull both open at once. To prevent this, they never unlock the secondary latches to begin with.
If you don’t want the door to open, why put a door there in the first place?
I leave one door locked in high wind conditions, but I do post a sign on the locked door.
Also if the lock or hinge is acting up on one door, it might get left locked while we wait for a repairman.
Why do 24-hour shops have locks?
Exactly this! I used to work in a store where they had the double doors, one door would unlock when turning the key, but the other door had security locks top and bottom and were a pain to open, so we didn’t.
No mention of climate control? Seems to me that opening one door out of two, makes for a good compromise between customer convenience and the cashiers attempt to stay at a comfortable temperature.
If you can think of one-thousand reasons, there is another thousand out there just waiting to be discovered.
Local 7-11 when I was a kid, locked one of the doors because that was where he wanted to put the sunglasses display.
Because even 24-hour stores have occasional situations where they need to lock up - after robberies, disaster recovery, renovations, etc.