The national contract security industry hit roughly $45 billion in 2021. That number gets thrown around in trade publications and investor presentations, and it’s big enough that people sometimes forget to ask the follow-up question: where is that money actually going?
In Memphis, the answer is specific. The money is going to logistics corridors, hospital campuses, commercial office buildings, retail centers fighting theft, and residential communities that have decided police response times aren’t fast enough. Each of these segments is growing for its own reasons, and taken together, they’ve turned the Memphis metropolitan area into one of the more interesting private security markets in the Southeast.
I’ve spent the last month talking to company owners, contract managers, and property operators across Shelby County. What follows is a breakdown of where the demand is coming from and what’s driving it.
The Logistics Juggernaut
You cannot talk about Memphis economics without talking about logistics. The city is home to FedEx’s world headquarters and the largest cargo airport on the planet. That single fact shapes everything.
The warehouse corridor along Airways Boulevard and Lamar Avenue stretches for miles. If you’ve driven that route lately, you’ve noticed the construction. New distribution centers going up, existing facilities expanding, temporary staffing agencies multiplying in strip malls nearby. Every one of those warehouses needs security.
The demand isn’t complicated to understand. These facilities operate 24 hours a day. They contain millions of dollars in inventory. They employ hundreds or thousands of temporary workers who cycle through on seasonal schedules. Theft is a constant problem, both external and internal. A single trailer loaded with electronics can represent six figures in merchandise, and it takes one person with a set of bolt cutters and five minutes of unwatched gate time to make it disappear.
Security at logistics facilities means access control at entry points, CCTV monitoring of loading docks and parking areas, perimeter patrol, and employee screening during shift changes. Companies that can provide guards who understand warehouse operations have more work available than they can staff.
The growth shows no signs of slowing. Amazon has been expanding its Memphis-area footprint. Other e-commerce operations follow FedEx’s supply chain infrastructure into the region. Every new distribution center is a new security contract waiting to be signed.
Healthcare Facilities Post-COVID
The Medical District in Memphis sits just east of downtown, anchored by Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. Regional Medical Center at Memphis, the city’s primary Level 1 trauma center, handles some of the most violent injury cases in the country.
Healthcare security has always been necessary. Hospitals deal with psychiatric emergencies, domestic violence situations that follow victims into the ER, drug-seeking behavior, and the general tension that comes with a building full of scared, hurting people and their stressed families. That was true before 2020.
COVID changed the math. The pandemic brought new security requirements that hospitals hadn’t planned for. Entrance screening stations needed staff. Visitor restriction policies needed enforcement. Vaccination sites needed crowd management. Fights broke out at screening checkpoints when visitors were denied entry. Nurses reported a spike in verbal and physical assaults from patients and family members frustrated by pandemic restrictions.
By November 2021, many of these pandemic-era security measures have become permanent. Hospitals that added entrance guards 18 months ago aren’t removing them. The visitor management systems that required security staff are staying in place. And the baseline level of workplace violence in healthcare settings hasn’t decreased.
Memphis hospitals are major employers and major security clients. The Medical District alone represents dozens of security positions across multiple facilities, and the demand extends to Baptist Memorial Health Care campuses in East Memphis, Germantown, and DeSoto County.
Commercial Property and the Office Corridor
East Memphis along Poplar Avenue from I-240 to Germantown has been the city’s primary office corridor for decades. Clark Tower, Triad Centre, the towers at Ridgeway Center, and dozens of smaller office buildings line the route. These properties have traditionally maintained security through a combination of lobby guards, after-hours patrol, and access card systems.
The shift in 2021 is occupancy. Many office buildings saw tenants reduce their space during 2020 as remote work took hold. Now, some are returning. Others aren’t. The buildings with lower occupancy face a specific security challenge: empty floors and unused parking garages create opportunities for break-ins, vandalism, and unauthorized access.
Property managers are responding with increased patrol frequency rather than permanent guard stations. It’s cheaper to have a mobile patrol check a half-empty building every 90 minutes than to post a guard at a lobby desk watching nobody walk in. This shift benefits security companies that operate patrol divisions with GPS-tracked vehicles and real-time reporting.
Downtown Memphis presents a different picture entirely. The Beale Street entertainment district draws large crowds on weekends, and crowd management security is a specialized skill set. Hotels along the riverfront, the Convention Center, and the growing number of residential lofts in the South Main Arts District all generate security needs that vary by time of day and day of week.
The downtown market is event-driven and seasonal in ways that East Memphis office security isn’t. Beale Street Music Festival, Memphis in May, college football weekends at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. Each one creates temporary demand spikes that security companies need to staff for and then scale back down.
Retail Loss Prevention
This is the segment that gets the most public attention, for obvious reasons. Memphis has a retail theft problem. It’s not unique to Memphis. Organized retail crime is a national issue in 2021. Theft rings operate across multiple states, hitting the same chains in the same patterns. Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and CVS have all acknowledged the problem in corporate earnings calls this year.
In Memphis, the concentration of retail theft tracks with the concentration of retail itself. Wolfchase Galleria in Cordova, one of the largest malls in Tennessee, employs a significant in-house security team and supplements with contract guards during high-traffic periods. Stores inside the mall maintain their own loss prevention staff on top of that.
The Oak Court Mall area in East Memphis, smaller and more upscale, faces different theft patterns. Less smash-and-grab, more organized shoplifting of high-value merchandise from department stores and specialty retailers.
Poplar Plaza, Laurelwood Shopping Center, and the retail clusters along Winchester Road in Hickory Hill each have their own security dynamics. The common thread is that store managers feel they can’t rely on MPD to respond to theft calls quickly enough to catch anyone.
Retail security spending in Memphis is up across the board. The question for security companies isn’t whether there’s demand. It’s whether they can find and train enough guards to meet it.
Residential Communities
This might be the fastest-growing segment in the Memphis market, and it’s the one that gets the least attention in industry publications.
Residential neighborhoods and homeowner associations across Shelby County have started contracting with private patrol companies. The pattern is clearest in neighborhoods that sit on the borders between high-crime and low-crime areas. Raleigh, near the Frayser line. Parts of Whitehaven adjacent to higher-crime pockets. Sections of Cordova that have seen property crime increases as the metro area sprawls eastward.
What these communities want is simple: a marked patrol car driving through their streets several times per night. The deterrence value is real. Burglars and car thieves prefer streets without regular security presence. A patrol vehicle making unpredictable rounds at 2 AM pushes criminal activity to the next neighborhood over.
The funding model varies. Some HOAs build the cost into monthly dues. Others run special assessments. A few neighborhoods have organized informal cost-sharing among homeowners on a voluntary basis.
This segment is price-sensitive in ways that commercial security isn’t. Residential communities negotiate hard on rates, and they’ll switch providers over a $2-per-hour difference. Security companies that target this market need high volume to make the margins work.
Growth Drivers and Constraints
The factors pushing Memphis’s security market upward are clear. Crime rates that remain among the highest in the nation. A logistics industry that’s expanding rapidly. Healthcare facilities with permanent post-COVID security needs. Retail chains spending more on loss prevention. Residential neighborhoods taking security into their own hands.
The constraints are equally clear. Staffing is the number one problem. Security companies across Memphis are competing for the same pool of workers, and they’re also competing with Amazon, FedEx, and warehouse operations that can offer $15-18 per hour for work that doesn’t involve confronting shoplifters or standing outside in January.
Finding qualified armed guards is even harder. The licensing requirements (16-hour unarmed training plus additional armed training and firearm qualification through TDCI) create a bottleneck. Companies can’t hire someone on Monday and put them on an armed post by Friday. The process takes weeks, and some candidates fail the background check or the shooting qualification.
Insurance costs represent another constraint. General liability premiums for security companies have been climbing, and the armed guard rider adds significant cost. Companies operating in high-crime areas with armed personnel face particularly steep premiums.
Training quality affects everything downstream. A poorly trained guard creates liability, damages client relationships, and generates turnover. Companies that invest in training beyond the state minimum tend to hold their contracts longer, charge higher rates, and maintain better reputations with property managers and facility directors who’ve been burned by cheap providers.
Where This Goes
Memphis’s private security market in 2021 is growing for structural reasons, not temporary ones. The logistics industry isn’t leaving. Healthcare security needs aren’t decreasing. Crime rates won’t flip overnight. Residential communities that have tasted regular patrol service aren’t going back to hoping for the best.
The companies that will capture the most value over the next few years are the ones solving the staffing problem. That means competitive wages, real training programs, benefits packages that reduce turnover, and a company culture that treats guards as professionals rather than interchangeable bodies filling a post.
The money is there. The market is there. The question is execution. Memphis has always been a city where opportunity and challenge sit right next to each other. Private security in 2021 is no exception.