I’ve got a few theories about why this is. You wanna hear them? (Of course you do!)
People who ignore signs are people who dislike to read in general. In essence, they’re subconciously “avoiding words”.
Advertising has numbed the brains of human beings to the sight of a sign. Signs, signs, everywhere are signs . . . People’s eyes skim over them because of it.
Familiarity. People tend to read signs more in an enviornment with which they’re unfamiliar and uncertain of where to go or what to do. If they’ve been to the store (or one of its kajillion clones) a hundred times, they’re not going to really notice signs that have always hung there-- the sign, in a way, seems more like a decorative object.
I can understand having an emergency door near the main doors if the main ones require electricity to operate correctly. I can’t understand why that emergency door needs to be hooked to an alarm. What possible safety purpose does that alarm serve? The only purpose I can think of is a negative one: by causing so many false alarms, it makes people less inclined to take alarms seriously.
Let A = “there exists a certain structural feature in a certain location in a building”
Let B = “there is a good reason for this feature”
Let S(name) be a statement made by (name)
Your post can be stated as
S(Dante) = If A then B (If “an architect put the door there” then “there might actually be a reason we haven’t thought of”)
While mine can be stated as
S(sturmhauke) = If not B then not A (If “a building… with a stupid layout” then “there’s never been [one]”)
S(Dante) and S(sturmhauke) are contrapositives of each other. Either they are both true or they are both false. I was being sarcastic, and implying that I think S(sturmhauke) is false.
Specifically, I was thinking of this recent thread in which people complained of really stupid construction on their homes. I was also thinking of the parking garage at the Rincon Center in San Francisco. There are these strange concrete projections around all the support columns which make parking extremely difficult. While there may be some sort of seismic retrofit or something like that going on, it sharply limits my desire to use that garage.
The reason an emergency is wired to sound an alarm when opened is so that people will be alerted to the fact that (1) something is going on; (2) they may need to begin leaving the premises and (3) the sound will guide them to where there is a push-open, non-electrically-operated exit.
And it is actually illegal to chain shut or block what is supposed to be the emergency exit.
The problem, however, is that people are constantly opening this door and sounding the alarm, so that when there is an actual emergency, people may not actually react and be alarmed and alerted at all.
Actually, I think he was referring to the Legal Seafood at the Prudential Center, which was above the Shaw’s/Star Market until they built the new one over on Huntington and Ring Road where the OP apparently works.
Exactly. What is the point of limiting a door at the front of the store to emergency use only? Why not just make a regular exit, which can be use in emergencies as well?
Security, I’d imagine. If you have a lot of merchandise laying out in the open, you don’t want people being able to slip out the back door unnoticed. By making them walk past the registers and people up front, you’re at least able to see that they’re not carrying out a mound of your merchandise.
Regardless of the emergency exit having a questionable placement, it is still marked emergency exit and is for exiting in emergencies only.
Arguing that peope are justified in going through it is fucking stupid. I don’t think the stop sign at the end of my street is well placed, so I should just ignore it.
Fear Itself, I think you might want to reread this post.
As for those people who are suggesting taking the door and changing it’s status from being an emergency exit to being a regular exit, I’m not sure it’s that easy. Building code, AIUI, can get very abstruse, and the city of Boston might have a requirement for emergency exits based on square footage of the building, or length of walls, or any other generally reasonable formula - that in the case of this particular building, has left the store with no other choice but to add a generally superfluous, but required by code, emergency exit.
My money’s on this. My father owns a store, and was required by code during a recent remodel to install an alarmed emergency door. Because of the layout of the building, the historic arcitecture restrictions and ADA restrictions, they had to install it only a few feet from their regular back door. That’s code for you.