Roach Motel

Roach Motel is a term used to describe a roach bait device designed to catch cockroaches. Although the term is trademarked by the insect control brand, Black Flag, the phrase has come to be used as a reference to all traps that use a scent or other form of bait to lure cockroaches into a compartment in which a sticky substance causes them to become trapped.

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Early versions of the Roach Motels used food-based bait, but later designs incorporated pheromones. The widely known tagline of the Roach Motel was "Roaches check in -- but they don't check out!" In the 1980s, this line was frequently delivered by Muhammad Ali, who was then a spokesman for the product.

The term "roach motel" also refers to a low-priced lodging facility, usually a considerably older property in disrepair, not affiliated with a major chain, and located in a decaying area of town.

Roach motel metaphor in computing

The phrase roach motel has sometimes been used to refer to a proprietary file standard -- "you can check your data in, but you can't check it out".

It has also been used to describe a property of the Java platform's memory model. Under the Java memory model, compilers and virtual machines are free to move accesses to memory into synchronized blocks, but not to move them out.

The Roach Motel in popular culture

In A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Freddy Krueger kills a teenage girl (played by Brooke Theiss) by turning her into a cockroach, trapping her into a roach motel, and squishing it in his hand.