My dorm building in college had exit doors that were undersized for the fire codes. They fixed this by moving the exit/entrance door to one side of the hallway, and adding an emergency exit door on the other side. The emergency exit door had a single red sticker on the push bar that said "Emergency exit - Alarm will sound", and it really would. It happened at least 75 times in the first month after everyone moving in.

They fixed this by sending everyone 75 angry emails about it. The same thing happened the next year, and also every year since then. I heard (but could never confirm) that putting double doors for the entry/exit doors would have cost a total of $3,000 more, for the multiple exits.

I was at this casino minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, 'You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit.' As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run... If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.

• Mitch Hedberg

I'm a service tech. I frequently ask staff at places I'm working if they can shut off the alarm one one of those doors so I can use a door closer to my van. The alarms are almost never enabled to begin with. Hell, it seems like half of those doors never even get latched. The sign seems to be the main security measure on many of those doors.

They almost had alarms once. The fire code requires you to be able to get out in case of a fire. So they put doors in that pseudo lock and have alarms to try to keep people from stealing but allow them to escape in case of a fire.

In high theft areas or new buildings, they often still work.

The first time they break or someone disables them they have a high chance of never getting reactivated

Most of them don't, in my experience. Experience which stems from a game I made up called "See how many rooms you can get into before someone kicks you out of the building." We had a better name for it but I forgot, it's been a while since I had enough people to play with.

I used to install these. The stand alone units called "detex" are battery powered, and a solid 75% of businesses NEVER replace the battery.

Tried this once when I was a little kid in Walmart with Gramma. Yup there's alarms.

They certainly work in the Walmarts in my area. There's usually a good chance you can absolutely not see someone with a huge cart of shit running out of one of the back or side doors and setting the alarm off any given day you happen to also be in the store.

Most of them use a magnetic reed switch to trigger the alarm. Should be trivial to use a throwaway magnet to keep the alarm from going off.

I've had to use these before, when I lived in a dormitory that had frequent false fire alarms. The fire exit stairs took us to a series of one-way locking doors, ending with a "Do not exit, alarm will sound" door. At that point, even if we felt like it might be a false alarm, we had no choice but to go through the door. The first several times, it set off a weak alarm, but did not appear to be wired into anything else in the building. After a few times, it stopped going off, I assume because its battery died. It's nobody's job to replace those batteries, so they stay dead.

i worked a bunch of places where the door just says that and has no alarm

Theyre usually a silent alarm that becomes a real alarm later