Walk through the parking lot at Wolfchase Galleria on a Tuesday afternoon and you’ll see something that didn’t exist six months ago. Designated curbside pickup spots near the main entrances. Employees carrying bags to idling cars. Customers who never set foot inside the building, completing transactions through a rolled-down window.
It’s convenient. It’s contactless. And it’s creating security problems that most Memphis retailers didn’t plan for.
The Shift Happened Fast
When Shelby County’s Safer at Home order hit in late March, Memphis retailers had days to figure out how to keep selling without letting people inside. The stores that survived the spring did it by moving transactions outdoors. Curbside pickup, which had been a niche service mostly offered by grocery chains, became the default mode of retail across the city.
Kroger locations on Poplar Avenue and Union Avenue rolled it out within a week. Walmart stores across the metro area expanded their existing grocery pickup to include general merchandise. Target followed. By mid-April, smaller retailers at Laurelwood, Poplar Plaza, and the shops along Carrefour at Kirby Woods were running some version of the same model. Call ahead, pay by phone or online, pull up, and someone brings it to your car.
Now it’s August. Stores are reopening their doors with capacity limits. Yet curbside isn’t going away. Customers like it. Many retailers are treating it as permanent, even as they welcome people back inside. That means the security implications aren’t temporary either.
Parking Lots Became the Store
When the point of sale moves from inside a building to a parking lot, the security calculus changes completely.
Inside a store, you have cameras, controlled entry points, loss prevention staff, and defined traffic flow. A shoplifter has to get merchandise past at least one chokepoint. Employees work behind counters or in designated areas. The environment is structured.
A parking lot has none of that. Curbside pickup means employees are walking through open, uncontrolled space carrying merchandise. They’re approaching vehicles they can’t identify with any certainty. The customer on the phone who placed the order might not be the person in the driver’s seat.
Memphis PD data from the first half of 2020 shows property crime in commercial parking areas has climbed since the spring. Auto break-ins, which were already a persistent issue in Shelby County, spiked during the weeks when stores were closed and lots sat mostly empty. Thieves hit parked cars at shopping centers along Stage Road in Bartlett, at Southland Mall, and in the lots around Germantown Parkway.
The pattern is evolving. Now that curbside traffic has increased, the criminal opportunity is different. Packages sitting in cars while customers make a second stop. Employees carrying high-value items across open lots. Cash transactions happening at vehicle windows.
I talked to a loss prevention director at a Memphis retailer who asked not to be named. He said his team caught a group in June running a simple scam: one person would place a curbside order for electronics, while a second person in a different car watched which vehicle the employee approached. After the handoff, the second car would follow the buyer and steal the package at their next stop. “We’d never seen that before March,” he said.
Empty Stores After Dark
Reduced hours are the other half of the problem.
Plenty of Memphis retailers cut their operating hours during the pandemic. Stores that used to close at 9 or 10 p.m. now shut down at 6 or 7. That means three or four extra hours of darkness with merchandise sitting inside unoccupied buildings. Security patrols that were timed around old schedules need to be reconfigured. Alarm monitoring windows need adjustment.
Oak Court Mall, which was already struggling with foot traffic before COVID, has seen tenants reduce hours across the board. The stretches of Poplar Avenue between East Memphis and Germantown have a patchwork of operating schedules now. One store open until 8. The one next door dark by 5:30. The inconsistency makes it harder for security providers to establish predictable patrol routes.
At strip malls and standalone retail locations, the situation is worse. A store that closes early and doesn’t have its own security system depends on landlord-provided patrols, passing police cruisers, or nothing at all. In neighborhoods like Hickory Hill and Whitehaven, where commercial property crime was already a concern, the reduced hours have created windows of opportunity that weren’t there before.
Employee Safety Got Complicated
Before curbside, retail employees spent their shifts inside a building. Interactions with customers happened across a counter, under camera coverage, within earshot of coworkers. The environment wasn’t perfectly safe, of course. Memphis retail workers have always dealt with confrontations and theft. Still, the interior of a store offers more control than an open parking lot.
Curbside pickup puts employees outside, often alone, sometimes after sunset. They’re carrying merchandise to strangers’ cars. They’re handling payment disputes in person, standing next to a vehicle that can drive away at any moment. Several Memphis retailers have reported incidents where employees were verbally threatened during curbside handoffs, usually over order errors or wait times.
The risk isn’t theoretical. In cities across the country, curbside pickup has been the scene of assaults and robberies targeting retail workers. Memphis hasn’t seen a high-profile case yet, as far as I’m aware. The emphasis is on “yet.”
Smart retailers are pairing employees for curbside runs, especially after 4 p.m. Some have installed additional lighting in pickup zones. A few are requiring customers to show ID that matches the order name before releasing merchandise. These are basic steps. Not enough stores are taking them.
Organized Retail Crime Didn’t Take a Break
It would be nice to report that organized retail crime slowed down during the pandemic. It didn’t.
ORC groups in Memphis adapted just like everyone else. Booster crews targeting stores on Germantown Parkway shifted their methods. Instead of traditional grab-and-run thefts inside stores with reduced staff, some groups started targeting delivery trucks and curbside staging areas. Merchandise that’s been picked, packed, and staged for customer pickup is sitting in back rooms or near exits, often with less oversight than items on the sales floor.
The National Retail Federation flagged this trend in a June report. Retailers across the South reported an increase in theft from curbside staging areas during the second quarter. Tennessee wasn’t broken out separately in the data, and I’d be surprised if Memphis was immune.
Loss prevention teams are spread thin. Many retailers reduced LP staff during the shutdown, either through furloughs or layoffs. The teams that remain are focused on in-store operations as doors reopen, which means curbside zones get less attention. It’s a resource allocation problem with no easy answer.
What Security Providers Need to Understand
For security companies working retail contracts in Memphis, curbside pickup isn’t a temporary adjustment to accommodate. It’s a permanent change in how retail spaces operate, and security plans need to reflect that.
Parking lot patrols matter more now than they did in January. Camera coverage that focused on store interiors needs to extend to pickup zones. Lighting assessments should include the areas where curbside transactions happen, not just building perimeters. Guard posts that were positioned inside lobbies may need to shift to parking areas during peak pickup hours.
The companies that adapt their service models to these changes will keep their retail contracts. The ones still running the same patrol routes they designed in 2019 won’t.
Memphis retail was already under pressure before COVID. The pandemic didn’t invent new threats. It moved the existing ones outdoors, spread them across parking lots, and made them harder to control. The stores that figure this out will be fine. The ones that treat curbside as a temporary inconvenience are going to learn an expensive lesson.