The thermometer gun has become standard issue. Six months ago, most security guards in Memphis carried a flashlight, a radio, and maybe a sidearm. Now they carry all of that plus a forehead thermometer, a box of disposable masks, and a laminated card explaining Shelby County’s health directive to anyone who argues at the door.
If you manage commercial property in Memphis or hire contract security for your business, the fall of 2020 is bringing a problem you probably saw coming: COVID case counts are climbing again in Shelby County, and the guards standing at your entrances are caught in the middle of it.
The Second Wave Arrives on Schedule
Dr. Manoj Jain, the infectious disease specialist who has been one of Memphis’s most visible COVID voices, warned back in May that a second wave would likely hit in the fall. He was right. Shelby County Health Department data from the first week of October shows new daily cases trending upward after weeks of relative stability. The positivity rate, which had dropped below 5% in parts of September, has crept back above 7%.
The Labor Day weekend appears to have been a turning point. Health officials reported a noticeable uptick in cases roughly two weeks after the holiday, consistent with the virus’s incubation period. Now, with temperatures dropping and people moving indoors, epidemiologists expect the trend to continue through Thanksgiving and beyond.
For security companies operating across the Memphis metro, this second surge means the protocols they scrambled to create in March are about to get tested again. Only this time, there’s less federal stimulus money floating around, PPE supply chains are tighter, and their guards are tired.
What Guards Are Actually Doing Now
Walk into any major commercial building, hospital, or retail center in Memphis and the first person you’ll interact with is usually a security guard. That interaction has changed completely since March.
At most sites, guards are conducting temperature screenings at the entrance. Anyone registering above 100.4 degrees gets turned away or directed to a separate holding area. Guards are also enforcing Shelby County’s mask mandate, which has been in effect since July. For retail locations, they’re monitoring occupancy limits, sometimes with a handheld clicker, sometimes with a clipboard and tally marks.
These tasks sound simple on paper. In practice, they’ve turned security guards into the front line of public health enforcement, a role they weren’t trained for, aren’t paid extra for, and that regularly puts them in confrontations with people who don’t want to wear a mask.
A guard at a Poplar Avenue office building told me last week that he gets into at least two arguments per shift about masks. “I’m not a doctor,” he said. “I’m not the health department. I’m the guy at the door, and people are mad at me.”
Allied Universal, the largest security company in the country, has rolled out COVID-specific training modules for its Memphis-area guards. The training covers de-escalation techniques for mask confrontations, proper PPE usage, and symptom recognition. Securitas, the second largest national provider, has done something similar, distributing updated protocols to its Tennessee operations in September.
GardaWorld, which handles a significant number of contracts in the Memphis logistics and warehouse sector, has focused on screening procedures for facilities where hundreds of employees pass through gates during shift changes. Their challenge is throughput: screening 400 workers in 30 minutes without creating a bottleneck at the entrance requires multiple screening stations and trained personnel at each one.
Local Companies Adapting
The national firms have deep pockets and corporate training departments. Local companies are working with less.
Phelps Security, one of the better-known Memphis-based firms, has been adapting its operations since the spring. The company shifted resources toward temperature screening and capacity management contracts that didn’t exist before March. Several property management companies in the Germantown and East Memphis corridors have added Phelps guards specifically for COVID screening duties.
Shield of Steel, a veteran-owned company operating out of Lamar Avenue, has leaned on its military-trained staff to handle the enforcement side of things. Guards with law enforcement or military backgrounds tend to manage confrontations with more discipline, and that’s shown in fewer incident reports at their client sites. The company’s local knowledge helps too. A guard who grew up in South Memphis handles a tense exchange at a Whitehaven grocery store differently than someone who flew in from a staffing agency in Atlanta.
The trade-off with smaller firms like Shield of Steel is scale. They can’t match Allied Universal’s fleet of vehicles or Securitas’s national dispatch infrastructure. Their technology integration, things like real-time reporting dashboards and GPS-tracked patrol apps, tends to lag behind the nationals. For a property manager who needs 40 guards across a dozen sites by next Monday, the nationals win on sheer capacity. For a property manager who needs five reliable guards who know the neighborhood and won’t quit after a week, the local firms often deliver better.
The Staffing Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s the part that isn’t making headlines: security companies in Memphis are losing guards to COVID at an alarming rate.
Guards work indoors. They interact with hundreds of people per shift. They’re screening symptomatic individuals at close range. Despite PPE, despite training, they’re getting sick. When a guard tests positive, that’s a minimum of 10 to 14 days off the schedule. If the company is small, losing two or three guards at once can mean failing to staff a client’s site.
Recruiting replacements has gotten harder, not easier. The security guard labor pool in Memphis was already tight before the pandemic. Tennessee requires guards to hold a valid registration through TDCI’s Private Protective Services division, and the licensing process takes time. You can’t just pull someone off the street and put them on a post.
Wages haven’t kept pace with the added risk and responsibility. Most unarmed guards in the Memphis market are making $10 to $13 an hour. Armed guards get $14 to $18. Those rates were set for a job description that didn’t include health screening, mask enforcement, and daily exposure to a virus that has killed over 200,000 Americans.
Some guards have simply left the industry. They’ve moved to warehouse jobs at Amazon’s Memphis distribution centers or FedEx’s hub, where the pay is comparable and they don’t have to argue with strangers about face coverings.
PPE Costs Are Eating Margins
The financial pressure on security companies is real and getting worse. Disposable masks, face shields, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, thermometer guns, plexiglass barriers for guard stations. None of this was in the budget twelve months ago.
A security company owner I spoke with last week, who asked not to be named, said his PPE costs have added roughly $3 per guard-hour to his operating expenses. On a 1,000-hour-per-week operation, that’s $3,000 a week in costs that didn’t exist in 2019. He hasn’t been able to pass all of that through to clients. “Some clients get it,” he said. “Some clients tell me that’s my problem.”
The larger nationals have negotiated bulk PPE purchasing agreements that give them better pricing. Smaller Memphis firms are buying from the same distributors that supply restaurants and medical offices, competing for the same inventory.
What October Looks Like
Shelby County’s health directive remains in effect. Masks are required in public spaces. Businesses are expected to enforce capacity limits. Temperature screening isn’t mandated by the county, yet many property owners and corporate tenants require it as a condition of building access.
For security companies, October brings a new wrinkle: flu season. The symptoms of seasonal flu overlap with COVID, which means more people will be flagged at screening checkpoints. More flags mean more confrontations, more people turned away, and more calls to property managers asking what to do about the guy with a 101-degree temperature who insists it’s just allergies.
The guards at the door didn’t ask for any of this. They signed up to watch cameras, walk perimeters, and check IDs. Now they’re the first point of contact in a public health crisis, and they’re doing it for wages that haven’t changed since before anyone had heard of a coronavirus.
If you’re a property manager reading this, call your security provider this week. Ask about their COVID protocols, their guard vaccination plans for when a vaccine becomes available, and their contingency staffing if multiple guards go down at once. The companies that have real answers to those questions are the ones worth keeping. The ones that don’t are a liability you can’t afford this winter.