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You Need Holdup Alarms in Your Business

Many businesses overlook the need for holdup or panic alarms. These types of emergency buttons can mean the difference between life and death. Holdup alarms are features of a burglar alarm system. If you or an employee hits the alarm, it notifies a monitoring center that you require help.

Location, Location, Location

In this situation, law enforcement is sent out to assist. Yet businesses still overlook this simple element to keeping their employees and locations safe. Many do have holdup alarms at the obvious places – near cash registers or front desks. Yet businesses often neglect other obvious points of entry: a back entrance, a shipping and receiving area, even back offices where the safe might be.

A holdup alarm at the cash registers does help protect you and your employees from crimes of opportunity. It doesn’t help protect any of you from a crime that’s been planned and that uses another point of entry. A burglar targeting your business is more likely to have a less obvious plan. They may enter through unsecured doors in the back, looking to exploit an oversight most businesses make.

Maintenance & Service

Businesses also often fail to ensure that these alarms still work, or that they’re serviced, or the monitoring is paid for. It falls off the radar for them until the day they need it and discover it no longer works.

These silent alarms don’t exactly wear out – they’re durable – but to ensure your safety it’s important to have them serviced and tested. (There’s a specific way to test them, don’t just hit them yourself to see what happens.)

Different Types

There’s also a myth that these alarms are easy to see or recognize. If a cashier reaches under the table, for instance, a robber is going to notice this. That’s exactly why many alarms are made to be hit with a knee or pressed with a foot.

Having a holdup alarm is a low-cost way to ensure your employees and your business don’t pay a much higher cost. The safety and peace of mind it brings is worth the time it takes to implement it.