roach motel

English

Etymology

The meaning "low-priced motel" is because such a place might be expected to be infested with roaches. The meaning "something easy to enter, difficult to leave" is from American roach-bait brand Roach Motel, advertised with the slogan "Roaches check in, but they don't check out!"

Noun

roach motel (plural roach motels)

1. (derogatory) A low-priced motel in a state of disrepair.
2. Something that is easy to enter, but is difficult or costly to leave.
   • 2010, William H. Inmon, Bonnie O'Neil, Lowell Fryman, Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge, page 141:

     8.3.1 The Importance of Easy Access: Avoid the “Roach Motel!” In Chapter 6, we discussed what a “roach motel” was. You can get data into a “roach motel”, but you can't easily get it out.

   • 2011, Cory Doctorow, Context, page 102:

     Don't hope for a better shake from Apple, either. Apple's longstanding love-affair with proprietary formats and lock-ins will very likely make the iPad every inch the roach motel that the Kindle is

   • 2015, Scot R. Wheeler, Architecting Experience: A Marketing Science and Digital Analytics Handbook, page 186:

     The “Roach Motel” is a broad category of Dark Pattern that subsumes most types listed on this site. Put simply, a Roach Motel makes it very easy for a user to get into a certain situation, but then makes it hard for them to get out of it when they realize it is undesirable.

   • 2016 June 8, Zoe Kleinman, “Is the web full of nasty tricks?”, in BBC News:

     Ever signed up for something online and then found it very difficult to unsubscribe? Then you've been to a roach motel - one of many web design tricks employed by some firms to drum up more trade.

   • 2022, Robert A. Schwartz, John Aidan Byrne, Eileen Stempel, 40 Years of Experience with the National Market System (NMS), page 51:

     CAVOLI: If you do not know, 390 was a specific New York Stock Exchange rule that disallowed member organizations from trading off exchange, as late as 2001. MAHONEY: In the beginning, the NYSE was truly the roach motel.

   • 2022 December 9, Itu Rathore, “Is Amazon employing a deceptive strategy to keep its Prime members subscribed?”, in dazeinfo briefs‎^[1]:

     The research was conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, and the findings point to one conclusion: “Amazon Prime’s subscription model is a “roach motel,” where getting in is almost effortless, but escape is an ordeal.”