Safeway purposly blocking emergency exits.

[Martinjmpr]

I feel like I've seen several stores do this over the years.

Yup, the KS in Englewood on Broadway and Floyd does the same thing. At 7pm the "second" door is locked and usually blocked with grocery carts. It doesn't even have emergency push bars AFAIK because it's a sliding door, not a hinged door.

Funny thing is, that KS does have a security guard.

I had never thought about the fire exit implications until now but it does seem wrong to deliberately block a potential fire exit. I wonder if the number of fire exits required is linked to the number of people they have in the store and they can get away with this by saying "after 7pm we don't have more than XX people in the store so we only need one exit?"

[68Charger]

Yup, the KS in Englewood on Broadway and Floyd does the same thing. At 7pm the "second" door is locked and usually blocked with grocery carts. It doesn't even have emergency push bars AFAIK because it's a sliding door, not a hinged door.

Keep in mind that commercial automatic sliding doors WILL open if you push hard enough on them when closed...(look for the hinges on the side, they're just latched to the track normally) they are also an emergency exit.

This is also done so you're not trapped in a power outage.