An audible alarm encourages people to tamper with it when it breaks and starts misfiring. Sure, they should put in a maintenance request, but they frequently take things into their own hands, even if maintenance is good about these things. And if the audible alarm just dies and there is no central management, how would you know? Stores don't really want to have to pay people to stand around with a stopwatch to determine if a time-based audible alarm still functions properly, and they also don't want to scare customers when things go wrong or when the alarm correctly goes off for a door just slightly ajar (and thus it wouldn't be immediately obvious which one needed to be closed).

With centralized monitoring, this all becomes much easier, and you can inspect a whole row of freezers in less than a minute. You can even do it remotely, just watching when customers open and close the doors on a security camera and checking that the control system registered it correctly.

See also: dump trucks that have alarms if you start to move while the bed is up. It's a great safety feature on the highway, but it's annoying on the job site if you can't just dump everything out while standing still, so it frequently gets disabled by the workers, especially if it starts to misfire. This is how you end up with dump trucks going highway speeds with their beds up taking out overhead signage and slamming into bridges. The stakes are much higher, yet workers would still rather rip out the alarm.

This is remote management, not just monitoring. Say you want your fridges to integrate with weather predictions, or prepare for a change of stock in a specific freezer across 100 sites. Features are appealing, but hopefully LLMs can make these cowboys finally secure implementations that they have never been forced to before.

How do you measure core temperature of, say, a block of frozen fish without destroying the packaging and contaminating the good? Do they throw it away after measurements?