The parking lot shooting at Wolfchase Galleria in early October rattled shoppers and put Memphis mall security back in the headlines. Two juveniles were charged after an exchange of gunfire outside the mall on a Sunday afternoon, sending families scrambling for cover. Memphis Police bulked up patrols around the property the next day, and mall management issued statements promising tighter enforcement of existing security protocols.
That incident, while dramatic, wasn’t isolated. Memphis malls and shopping centers had dealt with violence, theft, and disorderly conduct throughout 2019. What it did accomplish was accelerate the holiday security planning that private firms and property managers normally kick off in mid-October. This year, the timeline moved up by several weeks.
The Holiday Security Machine
Private security in Memphis is a seasonal business, at least in part. Companies that staff retail locations, shopping centers, and event venues see their headcounts swell between late October and early January. The holiday shopping season generates demand that can’t be met with existing rosters, so firms recruit temporary guards, run them through abbreviated training programs, and deploy them to posts that only exist for about ten weeks each year.
The three largest private security companies operating in Memphis, Allied Universal, Securitas, and GardaWorld, all began their seasonal hiring pushes in September. Job postings for temporary security positions at Memphis retail sites started appearing on Indeed and local job boards around the same time. Pay ranged from $10 to $14 per hour for unarmed positions, with armed posts commanding $15 to $18.
Allied Universal, the largest private security firm in the country, held its ground as the dominant player in Memphis retail. The company had contracts at multiple shopping centers across Shelby County and regularly staffed large events at the FedExForum and Liberty Bowl. Its holiday hiring in the Memphis market typically added 50 to 80 temporary guards between October and December.
Securitas, the Swedish-owned firm that ranked second nationally, maintained a Memphis office on Poplar Avenue and handled contracts for several commercial properties and corporate campuses in the East Memphis and Germantown corridors. Its holiday staffing focused more on office parks and distribution centers than on malls, though the company did provide guards for some retail clients.
GardaWorld, the Canadian-based firm that had expanded aggressively into the U.S. Southeast over the previous few years, picked up contracts in Memphis that included cash-in-transit services and some retail security work. The company’s Memphis operations centered on armored car services for banks and retailers who needed secure cash handling during the high-volume holiday period.
Wolfchase Galleria: Security Under Scrutiny
The October shooting forced Wolfchase Galleria’s management to address security questions that had been building for months. The mall, located at 2760 North Germantown Parkway in the Cordova area, was the largest enclosed shopping center in the Memphis metro. It drew crowds from across Shelby County and neighboring Fayette and Tipton counties, which meant its parking lots and common areas handled thousands of visitors on busy weekends.
Mall security at Wolfchase operated through a combination of in-house guards employed by the property management company, CBL & Associates Properties, and contract security personnel. The in-house team handled interior patrols, monitored surveillance cameras, and managed the mall’s dress code policy, which had drawn controversy earlier in 2019 when two men were arrested after a dispute over the hoodie policy.
That dress code issue, which played out in February, highlighted the tension between security enforcement and customer experience. Mall management had implemented a policy requiring shoppers to lower their hoods while inside the building, arguing it was a safety measure tied to surveillance camera effectiveness. Critics called it discriminatory. The controversy lingered through the spring before quieting down, though the underlying tension between aggressive security measures and public perception never fully resolved.
For the holiday season, Wolfchase was adding guards to its parking lot patrols, extending security hours to match the mall’s extended shopping schedule, and coordinating with MPD’s Appling Farms precinct on a joint patrol plan. The Memphis Police Department had agreed to station officers near the main entrances during peak hours on Black Friday weekend and throughout December.
Oak Court Mall: A Different Challenge
Oak Court Mall, the smaller, more upscale shopping center at Poplar and Perkins in East Memphis, faced a different kind of security challenge. The mall’s tenant mix, anchored by Macy’s and a collection of specialty retailers, attracted a demographic that expected visible security without the feel of a lockdown.
Security at Oak Court relied on a small team of uniformed guards who focused on customer service as much as loss prevention. The property didn’t deal with the same volume of violent incidents that Wolfchase experienced, though auto break-ins in the parking lot were a recurring problem. The Poplar Avenue corridor, one of the busiest retail stretches in the city, saw steady property crime throughout 2019.
For the holidays, Oak Court’s management company was increasing evening patrol hours and adding a second guard to the parking garage, which had been a particular target for vehicle break-ins during previous holiday seasons. The mall also planned to bring in off-duty MPD officers for Black Friday and the first two weekends in December, a practice it had followed since at least 2016.
Southland Mall: Staffing the Southeast
Southland Mall, located on South Third Street near the intersection with Shelby Drive, operated in a tougher environment than either Wolfchase or Oak Court. The mall sat in a high-crime area of South Memphis that regularly posted some of the city’s worst crime statistics. Shoplifting, disorderly conduct, and parking lot crime were constant concerns.
The property had cycled through ownership changes and management companies over the years, and its tenant roster had thinned considerably by 2019. Several anchor spaces sat empty. Yet Southland still drew foot traffic from the surrounding Whitehaven and Westwood neighborhoods, and the stores that remained needed security coverage.
Private security at Southland relied heavily on contract guards, many of whom came from smaller local firms rather than the national companies. The guards worked for less money, and turnover was high. Property management tried to address the problem by offering slightly better rates to firms that could guarantee consistent staffing, yet the economics of a struggling mall in a high-crime area made quality security hard to sustain.
The holiday season brought a modest increase in guard hours at Southland. The property couldn’t afford the level of coverage that Wolfchase or Oak Court deployed, so management focused its resources on the interior common areas and the main entrance. Parking lot patrols happened when staffing allowed, which wasn’t always.
The Seasonal Guard Hiring Crunch
Hiring temporary security guards in Memphis was never easy, and it got harder each year. The pool of qualified candidates, people who could pass a background check, complete the state-mandated training, and show up reliably, was smaller than the demand.
Tennessee requires security guards to register with the Private Protective Services division of the Department of Commerce and Insurance. Unarmed guards need to complete 16 hours of training within their first 90 days of employment. Armed guards face stiffer requirements: a firearms qualification course, additional training hours, and a separate registration that must be renewed every two years.
The training timeline created a bottleneck for seasonal hiring. A company that wanted to hire a guard in October and have that person working a retail post by Black Friday had to move fast. Some firms tried to maintain a roster of previously trained guards who could be called back for seasonal work without repeating the full training cycle. Others accepted that some percentage of their seasonal hires wouldn’t complete training in time and would spend the first few weeks of the holiday season in roles that didn’t require a full certification.
Pay was the other obstacle. At $10 to $14 per hour for unarmed positions, security guard work competed with retail and warehouse jobs that often paid as well or better. FedEx, the largest private employer in Memphis, was offering seasonal warehouse positions at $12 to $16 per hour in the fall of 2019, with overtime available during peak shipping weeks. Amazon’s Memphis-area distribution centers were hiring at similar rates. A prospective security guard who could earn more money moving boxes in a climate-controlled warehouse had limited reason to choose a job that involved standing outside a mall entrance in the cold.
The national firms dealt with this by offering modest sign-on bonuses and guaranteeing a minimum number of weekly hours. Smaller Memphis firms, which lacked the financial cushion to match those incentives, relied on personal networks and word-of-mouth recruiting. Some owners of local security companies told me they spent more time in November finding guards than doing anything else.
Technology Filling the Gaps
Where human staffing fell short, technology picked up some of the slack. Memphis retailers and mall operators had invested steadily in surveillance cameras, access control systems, and license plate readers over the previous several years.
Wolfchase Galleria upgraded its camera system in 2018, adding high-definition units to parking lot light poles and connecting them to a monitoring station inside the mall’s security office. The system allowed guards to track incidents in real time and provided footage that MPD used in several criminal investigations throughout 2019.
License plate readers, or LPRs, were becoming common at Memphis shopping centers. The devices scanned plates of vehicles entering and exiting parking areas, checking them against databases of stolen vehicles and wanted persons. Several retail properties in the Germantown Parkway corridor had installed LPR systems during 2018 and 2019, and the technology was credited with helping recover stolen vehicles on at least a dozen occasions during the year.
Retailers inside the malls deployed their own loss prevention technology. Electronic article surveillance (those tags that trigger alarms at store exits), CCTV with facial recognition capabilities, and inventory tracking software all played roles in the holiday theft prevention strategy. National chains like Target and Walmart operated sophisticated loss prevention programs that combined technology with trained investigators, and their Memphis locations were no exception.
What Shoppers Should Expect
Heading into the 2019 holiday season, Memphis shoppers were likely to notice more visible security at the city’s major retail centers. Uniformed guards, marked patrol vehicles, and the occasional police cruiser would be more common sights in parking lots and near entrances.
The question of whether that increased presence would translate into safer shopping experiences was harder to answer. Security professionals will tell you that visible guards deter opportunistic crime, the kind of smash-and-grab vehicle break-ins and shoplifting that spike during the holidays. They’re less effective against planned acts of violence, which tend to happen regardless of how many guards are posted.
Memphis had dealt with this tension for years. The October shooting at Wolfchase happened in broad daylight in a parking lot with security cameras and a guard staff. No amount of seasonal hiring would have prevented two people from pulling guns on each other in a parking lot. What it could do, and what the holiday security buildup aimed to accomplish, was reduce the volume of lower-level crime that made shopping unpleasant and pushed customers toward online alternatives.
For the security companies themselves, the holiday season represented their busiest and most profitable quarter. How well they performed over the next two months would determine which firms retained their contracts heading into 2020 and which ones lost them to competitors willing to offer better service at the same price. In Memphis, where the private security market was competitive and the margin for error was thin, the holidays were as much a test for the companies as they were for the shoppers they protected.