The Sears at Wolfchase Galleria is gone. Doors locked, parking lot empty, the massive anchor space sitting dark at the east end of the mall on Stage Road. If you drove past it last month, you already know what it looked like. A building-sized sign that retail in Memphis is shrinking fast, and whatever fills that gap won’t look like what came before.
For property managers and loss prevention teams across Shelby County, the question isn’t just about empty storefronts. It’s about what happens to the stores still open. Fewer anchors mean less foot traffic. Less foot traffic means fewer casual shoppers providing natural surveillance. And fewer eyes in the aisles means more opportunity for the people who walk in with no intention of paying.
Shoplifting Numbers That Nobody Wants to Talk About
Memphis Police Department’s 2018 crime data showed retail theft reports climbing for the third straight year. The numbers aren’t dramatic enough to make the evening news on WREG, and that’s part of the problem. Property crime rarely gets the same attention as violent crime in a city that recorded around 185 homicides last year.
Still, the National Retail Federation’s 2018 survey put organized retail crime losses at $777,500 per $1 billion in sales nationwide. Memphis retailers told me their numbers ran higher than the national average. One loss prevention manager at a Poplar Avenue chain store put it bluntly: “We’re writing off more product per quarter than we were three years ago, and our foot traffic is down 20 percent.”
That math doesn’t work for long.
The problem concentrates in three areas. Wolfchase Galleria on the city’s northeast side has dealt with repeated incidents over the past year, everything from grab-and-run crews targeting shoe stores to organized groups hitting electronics. Oak Court Mall in East Memphis, once considered the upscale alternative, saw its own share of theft-related police calls through 2018. And the Southland Mall area on Shelby Drive continues to struggle with property crime that goes beyond shoplifting into vehicle break-ins and armed robberies in the parking lots.
The Anchor Store Problem
When Sears closed its Wolfchase location in late 2018, it joined a growing list. Across Memphis, big-box retail has been pulling back. Some locations shutter quietly. Others announce “going out of business” sales that drag on for months, drawing bargain hunters and, inevitably, thieves who know the staff is skeleton-thin and the security cameras may not even be monitored anymore.
The domino effect hits smaller tenants hard. A strip mall on Winchester Road near Hickory Hill lost its largest tenant last spring. Within six months, two more shops closed. The remaining businesses, a nail salon and a phone repair shop, pooled money to hire a part-time security guard on weekends. That arrangement lasted about three months before the cost became too much.
This pattern repeats across the city. In Whitehaven, along Elvis Presley Boulevard, retail vacancies have climbed steadily. In Raleigh, the area around Austin Peay Highway has seen similar attrition. Each closure removes another set of employees, another set of cameras, another pair of eyes from the commercial corridor.
What fills the void matters. Dollar stores and auto parts shops tend to move into former big-box spaces. They operate with smaller staffs and thinner margins, which means less money for security infrastructure. A former Target location that had 15 cameras, electronic article surveillance gates, and a dedicated loss prevention team gets replaced by a business with maybe two cameras and no dedicated security budget at all.
Loss Prevention Becomes the Growth Industry
Here’s the flip side. While retail contracts in Memphis are shrinking in total square footage, the remaining stores are spending more per location on security and loss prevention. Target, Walmart, and Kroger have all increased their LP budgets nationally, and the Memphis-area stores reflect that trend.
Allied Universal, already the largest private security employer in the country, has been picking up retail contracts across the Mid-South over the past year. Their pitch to retailers is straightforward: uniformed presence at entrances, loss prevention officers working the floor in plainclothes, and integration with store camera systems. A regional manager I spoke with confirmed they’d added “several” new retail accounts in the Memphis metro area during 2018, though he wouldn’t name specific clients.
GardaWorld has also been expanding its Memphis footprint. The Canadian-headquartered firm acquired several smaller security companies over the past two years and has been aggressively pursuing retail and commercial contracts in Tennessee. Their Memphis office on Poplar has added staff, and they’ve been visible at industry networking events around town.
The competition for retail security contracts is getting tighter. National firms can undercut local operators on price because they spread their overhead across hundreds of accounts. A Memphis-only security company bidding against Allied Universal for a Walmart contract is fighting uphill on cost, even if their local knowledge and responsiveness might be better.
What Organized Retail Crime Actually Looks Like
There’s a gap between what most people picture when they hear “shoplifting” and what loss prevention teams actually deal with in 2019. The teenager pocketing a candy bar still exists. That’s not what’s driving the numbers.
Organized retail crime, or ORC, involves groups that steal merchandise systematically and resell it. Memphis sits on major interstate corridors (I-40, I-55, I-240) that make it easy to move stolen goods quickly. A crew can hit three or four stores along the Germantown Parkway corridor in an afternoon, load a van, and be across state lines before anyone compiles the incident reports.
The Tennessee Retail Crime Association, which includes members from major chains operating in Memphis, reported a 15 percent increase in ORC incidents statewide during 2018. Baby formula, over-the-counter medications, razor blades, and high-end cosmetics top the list of targeted products. These items are easy to resell online or through flea markets and discount shops.
Memphis police formed a dedicated retail crime unit a few years back, and they’ve made some significant busts. In late 2018, a multi-store theft ring operating across Shelby County was broken up after a months-long investigation. The recovered merchandise filled a storage unit. Cases like that make the news. The daily grind of individual thefts, each one too small to warrant a detective’s time, does not.
The Technology Arms Race
Retailers that can afford it are investing in technology. Video analytics that can identify known shoplifters when they enter a store. Electronic article surveillance systems with better detection rates. Point-of-sale monitoring that flags suspicious return patterns.
Kroger’s Memphis-area stores have been testing new camera configurations, adding coverage in self-checkout lanes where “sweethearting” (scanning one item while bagging two) costs the chain millions annually. Walmart’s Neighborhood Market locations along Summer Avenue and in Bartlett have upgraded their entrance systems.
The technology investment creates another revenue stream for security companies. Firms that can install and monitor retail surveillance systems are finding steady work even as traditional guard contracts face pricing pressure. It’s not glamorous. Nobody got into the security business dreaming about configuring cameras above a checkout lane. Yet that’s where the money is heading.
What 2019 Holds
The closures won’t stop. Payless ShoeSource announced it would shutter all locations, including its Memphis-area stores. Gymboree is gone. Charlotte Russe is closing. Each one represents another dark storefront, another gap in the commercial fabric of neighborhoods that depend on retail employment and retail tax revenue.
For the security industry in Memphis, this creates a strange dynamic. Total retail square footage is declining. The number of contracts available is shrinking. Yet the intensity and cost of security at surviving locations is going up. Stores that remain open in high-theft areas are willing to pay more for better protection because the alternative, absorbing the losses or closing, costs more.
Allied Universal and GardaWorld will keep growing their retail portfolios in the Memphis market. Smaller local firms will need to differentiate on service quality and response time, because they can’t compete on price. And loss prevention specialists, the people who actually understand retail theft patterns and can train store employees to spot ORC activity, will be in high demand.
The Sears building at Wolfchase sits empty. Down the corridor, the stores that survived are spending more on cameras, more on guards, more on electronic tags. That’s the retail security story in Memphis right now. Not growth across the board, and not collapse either. A market that’s concentrating its spending in fewer locations while the empty spaces multiply around them.