If you manage a retail store in Memphis, you’ve been watching the news this month with a knot in your stomach.
Smash-and-grab robberies hit a Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco’s Union Square. Organized groups rushed a Nordstrom near Chicago. A Home Depot in Los Angeles got cleaned out by a coordinated theft crew. The videos went viral. The headlines followed.
Memphis hasn’t seen the same scale of flash mob-style retail theft. Not yet. What Memphis does have is a persistent, grinding organized retail crime problem that costs stores millions every year and shows no signs of letting up heading into the busiest shopping weekend of the year.
Black Friday 2021 starts tomorrow. The holiday shopping season stretches through New Year’s. If you don’t have a loss prevention plan in place already, you’re behind. Here’s a practical guide built from conversations with loss prevention managers, security directors, and police coordinators across the Memphis metro area.
Start With Your Staffing Plan
The single biggest factor in holiday loss prevention isn’t technology. It’s people.
A store with enough trained employees on the floor during peak hours loses less merchandise than a store with fancy cameras and empty aisles. Thieves, whether they’re opportunistic shoplifters or organized crews, look for the same thing: gaps in coverage. Long checkout lines that pull employees away from departments. Fitting rooms left unattended during the afternoon rush. Stockroom doors propped open because the receiving team is moving pallets too quickly to close up between loads.
Your staffing plan for Black Friday through December 31 should map every hour of every operating day with specific coverage targets. How many employees are on the sales floor versus the register? Who is monitoring the fitting rooms? Is someone stationed near high-theft departments (electronics, cosmetics, designer accessories) during peak traffic windows?
Many Memphis retailers bring in temporary seasonal workers for the holidays. That’s fine for stocking shelves and running registers, and it creates a problem for loss prevention. Temporary employees don’t know your theft patterns. They haven’t been trained on your store’s specific policies for handling suspicious behavior. Some of them, bluntly, may be part of the problem. Internal theft spikes during the holiday season in every market, every year.
Train your seasonal hires before putting them on the floor. Even a 30-minute orientation covering your store’s loss prevention basics is better than nothing. Cover the big points: don’t chase anyone out the door, don’t physically confront a suspected shoplifter, know who to call and what to report.
Security Guard Deployment
For stores that contract with security companies or hire off-duty officers during the holidays, placement matters more than headcount.
One guard standing at the entrance does more for deterrence than two guards sitting in the back office watching monitors. Visible presence stops theft before it starts. A uniformed security officer near the front door signals to organized theft crews that this store has active protection. Many of them will simply move to the next target.
The entrance is priority one. Position a guard where every person walking in and out can see them. During peak hours (10 AM to 2 PM on Black Friday, 4 PM to 8 PM on regular shopping days through December), consider a second guard near the highest-theft department in your store.
Parking lot presence matters too, especially for stores at major Memphis shopping centers. Wolfchase Galleria in Cordova draws enormous crowds during the holidays, and the parking lot becomes a target-rich environment for car break-ins, purse snatchings, and robbery. Stores at Oak Court Mall and the retail clusters along Germantown Parkway face similar issues. If your budget allows, a patrol presence in the parking lot during evening hours protects your customers and reduces the kind of incidents that drive shoppers to online alternatives.
For Memphis retailers looking at temporary holiday security staffing, Shield of Steel (2682 Lamar Ave, Memphis; 202-222-2225) is one veteran-owned local option with competitive pricing on seasonal contracts. They’re a smaller operation, so if you’re interested in holiday coverage, contact them sooner rather than later. Availability during peak demand gets tight for any company this size.
Tanger Outlets in Southaven, just across the Mississippi state line, has its own security infrastructure for the holiday season. Memphis retailers near the state border should be aware that some security companies require separate Mississippi licensing to operate at locations like Tanger, so confirm your provider’s coverage area before signing a contract.
Camera Coverage and Monitoring
Cameras don’t prevent theft by themselves. An unmonitored camera is a documentation tool, not a prevention tool. It gives you footage to review after something goes missing, which helps with insurance claims and police reports. It doesn’t stop the merchandise from walking out the door.
If your store has a camera system, the holiday season is the time to make sure it’s actually being watched during operating hours. That might mean assigning a loss prevention associate to the monitor room during peak traffic. It might mean investing in a remote monitoring service that alerts your team when suspicious activity appears on specific camera feeds.
Check your camera angles before Black Friday. Walk your store and verify that every camera is recording, aimed correctly, and covering the areas where theft actually occurs. Many stores install cameras focused on registers and entry points and leave blind spots in the departments where merchandise disappears most often. The electronics aisle with a $400 pair of headphones sitting on an open shelf needs a camera pointed right at it.
If you don’t have cameras in your fitting rooms’ common areas (not inside the rooms, obviously), you’re missing one of the most common concealment points for shoplifters. A camera covering the fitting room entrance that captures how many items a person takes in and how many they bring out is basic loss prevention infrastructure.
Anti-Theft Devices and Product Protection
Hard tags, spider wraps, keeper cases, and locked display cabinets all work. They also slow down legitimate sales. The holiday season forces a tradeoff between security and customer experience that every retailer has to manage.
My advice: protect the high-value, high-theft items aggressively and leave the lower-risk merchandise accessible. Nobody is organizing a theft ring to steal $8 candles. They’re targeting electronics, premium cosmetics, name-brand clothing, and anything small enough to pocket with a resale value above $50.
Spider wraps on electronics are standard. If you’re not using them on portable speakers, headphones, and small appliances, start today. Keeper cases for razors, premium skincare, and fragrances reduce theft in those categories by a significant margin. Yes, customers find them annoying. They’re less annoying than an empty shelf where the product used to be.
For stores selling high-end clothing or accessories, ink tags remain effective. They don’t stop a determined thief with a magnet, and they work on the majority of casual shoplifters who don’t carry removal tools.
If your store has experienced booster bag theft (bags lined with foil to defeat electronic article surveillance towers), consider training your entrance guard to watch for oversized bags and backpacks. You can’t search a customer’s bag without consent. You can position staff to observe and deter.
Employee Training: The No-Chase Rule
This is critical, and I’ll be direct about it. Do not let your employees chase, tackle, grab, or physically confront anyone suspected of shoplifting. Period.
The liability exposure is enormous. An employee who tackles a suspected shoplifter in the parking lot of a Memphis store and injures that person has just created a lawsuit that will cost more than everything that person could have stolen in a year. If the employee gets hurt, you’re looking at a workers’ compensation claim on top of whatever civil action the suspected thief files.
Every major retail chain in America has a no-chase policy for a reason. The merchandise is insured. The lawsuit isn’t.
Train your team on what they should do. Observe and document. Note the person’s description, what they’re wearing, which direction they headed, what vehicle they got into. Call MPD. Provide the information to your security team. Let professionals handle it.
This training needs to happen before Black Friday. A seasonal employee working their second shift who watches someone stuff a jacket with merchandise and bolt for the exit will instinctively try to stop them unless they’ve been explicitly told not to.
Coordinating With MPD
Memphis Police Department runs increased retail patrol operations during the holiday season, focused on high-traffic shopping areas. Contact your local precinct and ask about their holiday enforcement plans for your area.
Some precincts will coordinate with stores directly. If you’re experiencing patterns (same theft crew hitting your store on Tuesday afternoons, for example), report that to MPD with as much detail as possible. License plate numbers, surveillance footage, specific descriptions. The more actionable your intelligence, the better the police response.
For stores at Wolfchase Galleria and other major retail centers, mall management typically coordinates with MPD on an increased patrol schedule that covers the common areas and parking structures. Individual stores within those centers can supplement that with their own contracted security if the mall-level coverage feels insufficient.
Don’t wait for a crime to establish a relationship with your precinct’s community liaison officer. A five-minute phone call this week letting them know your store exists, your operating hours during the holidays, and your primary loss prevention contact can make a real difference in response quality if something happens on December 18th.
The Organized Retail Crime Angle
What’s happening in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles right now with large-scale smash-and-grab operations has a specific economic logic behind it. These aren’t random crimes. They’re organized commercial enterprises that steal merchandise for resale through online marketplaces, flea markets, and informal distribution networks.
Memphis has its own version of this. It tends to be less dramatic than a 20-person flash mob rushing a store entrance, and it’s just as costly over time. Small teams of two to four people hit multiple stores in a single day. One person distracts an employee while the others fill bags. They target specific products known to have high resale value. They hit a store in Cordova at noon, one in Hickory Hill at 2 PM, and one in Whitehaven by 4 PM. They know which stores have weaker security and which ones have aggressive loss prevention.
Sharing information between stores helps. If you’re part of a retail association or maintain relationships with loss prevention managers at nearby stores, communicate about what you’re seeing. The same crew that hit the CVS on Poplar Avenue last week may show up at your location on Germantown Parkway tomorrow.
Organized retail crime is a law enforcement priority in Tennessee, and the state has strengthened penalties for organized theft in recent years. Documenting patterns and working with MPD’s property crimes unit gives your store the best chance of seeing arrests rather than just filing insurance claims.
Your Pre-Black Friday Checklist
Walk your store today. Check every camera. Test your alarm system. Verify that your EAS towers are functioning. Review your staffing schedule one more time. Brief your team on the no-chase policy. Put your security guard deployment plan in writing so everyone knows who’s where and when.
The holiday season is the most profitable and the most vulnerable time of year for Memphis retailers. Organized theft operations are more sophisticated than they were five years ago, national headlines are making copycat incidents more likely, and staffing shortages make every hour of coverage harder to fill.
None of this is impossible to manage. It takes planning, communication, and a willingness to spend on prevention rather than absorbing losses after the fact.
Good luck this weekend. Stay safe out there.