Locker


A locker is a small, usually narrow storage compartment. They are commonly found in dedicated cabinets, very often in large numbers, in various public places such as locker rooms, workplaces, middle and high schools, transport hubs and the like. They vary in size, purpose, construction, and security.

General description and characteristics

Lockers are normally quite narrow, of varying heights and tier arrangements. Width and depth usually conform to standard measurements, although non-standard sizes are occasionally found. Public places with lockers often contain large numbers of them, such as in a school. They are usually made of painted sheet metal.
The characteristics that usually distinguish them from other types of cabinet or cupboard or storage container are:
Lockers are usually physically joined together side by side in banks, and are commonly made from steel, although wood, laminate, and plastic are other materials sometimes found. Steel lockers which are banked together share side walls, and are constructed by starting with a complete locker; further lockers may then be adding by constructing the floor, roof, rear wall, door, and just one extra side wall, the existing side wall of the previous locker serving as the other side wall of the new one. The walls, floors, and roof of lockers may be either riveted together or, more recently, welded together.
Locker doors usually have some kind of ventilation to provide for the flow of air to aid in cleanliness. These vents usually take the form of a series of horizontal angled slats at the top and bottom of the door, although sometimes parallel rows of small square or rectangular holes are found instead, running up and down the door. Less often, the side or rear walls may also have similar ventilation.
Locker doors usually have door stiffeners fixed vertically to the inside of the door, in the form of a metal plate welded to the inner surface, and protruding outward a fraction of an inch, thus adding to the robustness of the door and making it harder to force open.
Lockers are often manufactured by the same companies who produce filing cabinets, stationery cabinets (occasionally wrongly referred to as lockers, steel shelving, and other products made from sheet steel.

Variable characteristics of lockers

There are a number of features or characteristics which may vary in lockers. Because purchasers will need to specify what they want in each of these when ordering, it is more common to order a particular configuration rather than buy "off the shelf" in a shop, although certain very common configurations can be found in shops fairly easily. These features include:
There are a number of less standard lockers that are offered by various manufacturers. These include:
There are also several types of doorless locker design including those that are cylindrically, sphere and cone shaped. One such design eliminates the use of doors by offering a cylinder open at the front to receive items and can then be rotated to secure the contents.

Abolition of lockers

Some schools in the United States have been reported to have abolished the use of lockers. Security concerns are cited as the reason for this, with the concern being that lockers may be used to store contraband items such as weapons or drugs or pornographic material. There has been some controversy over in what circumstances school authorities or law-enforcement officials are permitted to search lockers, with or without informing the users, or with or without the users being present at the time of the search, and it has been considered a civil liberties issue, particularly in the U.S.
Other advocates of lockerless schools also cite reasons such as reducing noise by eliminating the clang of dozens of locker doors, or creating a more appealing environment aesthetically. It has also been claimed that removing lockers provides good training for students by forcing them to be more efficient in managing their books, and taking the time to plan what books they will need, and carrying only those ones.
In schools without lockers, students are sometimes provided with two complete sets of textbooks, one set being kept at school for use in class, and the other being kept at home for referring to for homework, thus limiting the amount of heavy carrying that would otherwise be required without having lockers to store them in between classes. However, research has shown an increase in the incidence of back injuries in some students, which has been directly attributed to the lack of lockers for storing books in, thus forcing students to spend more time carrying heavy loads of books in backpacks.
Some students oppose the abolition of lockers, arguing that their locker is one of the few private spaces they have in an environment which is otherwise communal and impersonal.
Coin-operated public luggage lockers can be present in bus stations and rail stations. In some countries they were commonplace from the 1950s to the 1970s, but eliminated for concern that bombs may be hidden in them. Some airports have also removed them for this reason.