Nine days ago, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland signed the Safer-at-Home executive order. Restaurants on Beale Street went dark. Retail shops along Poplar Avenue locked their doors. Barbershops in Whitehaven taped handwritten “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE” signs to their windows.
The city shut down fast.
Security companies didn’t get that option. They can’t. Under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s essential worker guidelines, private security guards fall into the same category as police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians. Governor Lee’s statewide stay-at-home order, which went into effect on March 31, carved out the same exemption.
So here we are. Memphis is closed, and the people paid to protect Memphis businesses are classified as essential. The problem is that “essential” doesn’t mean “funded.”
The Contracts That Vanished Overnight
Talk to any security company owner in Shelby County right now and you’ll hear the same story. One week they had a full roster of contracted sites. The next week, half those sites called to cancel or pause service.
A property manager I spoke with on Tuesday manages seven retail locations between Germantown Parkway and Kirby Whitten Road. Three of her tenants shut down permanently. Two more suspended operations with no timeline for reopening. She doesn’t need security at five of those seven sites right now, and she told her provider exactly that.
“I can’t pay for guards to stand in front of stores that don’t exist anymore,” she said.
Her security company lost about 40% of its weekly revenue in six days.
This pattern is repeating across the city. Night clubs, event venues, restaurants, office buildings that sent everyone home. The contracts didn’t just shrink. They disappeared. One mid-size firm operating out of the Lamar Avenue corridor told me they’ve lost 22 client sites since March 15. Twenty-two.
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance licenses roughly 600 contract security companies statewide. Nobody has official numbers yet on how many are bleeding money. From what I’m hearing, the answer is most of them.
Where Demand Is Surging
Here’s the thing nobody expected: while security work dried up at retail and hospitality sites, it exploded somewhere else.
Regional One Health and Methodist Le Bonheur hospitals both added security personnel in the last two weeks. The reason is straightforward. Emergency rooms are screening every person who walks through the door. Temperature checks. Symptom questionnaires. Restrictions on visitors. That takes bodies, and not all of them are nurses.
Grocery stores are in the same spot. The Kroger on Union Avenue had a guard at the entrance last week managing the line of customers waiting to get inside. That position didn’t exist three weeks ago. Walmart locations in Cordova and Southaven are running similar setups.
And then there’s the warehouses.
Memphis sits at the center of the nation’s logistics network. The FedEx World Hub alone employs around 11,000 people. Amazon has been adding distribution capacity in the metro area for two years. These facilities can’t shut down. Online orders have spiked to holiday-season levels, and every one of those packages still needs to move through Memphis.
Security at these sites has shifted from standard access control to something closer to a public health checkpoint. Guards are checking temperatures, enforcing six-foot spacing in break rooms, and turning away workers who show symptoms. That’s a different job description than what most guard companies trained their people for.
MPD Is Stretched, and Everyone Knows It
Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings held a press conference last week that got less attention than it deserved. He talked about maintaining staffing levels, protecting officers from exposure, and continuing to respond to priority calls. What he didn’t say out loud is what everyone in the industry already knows: MPD was short-staffed before COVID hit.
The department has been running below its authorized strength for years. Officers retiring faster than recruits graduate from the academy. A pandemic that could sideline dozens of officers at once with quarantine requirements doesn’t help.
For property owners and business managers, this has practical consequences. If you call 911 about a trespasser at your closed storefront on Summer Avenue, the response time might be longer than you’re used to. MPD has to prioritize violent crime, domestic calls, and medical emergencies. A broken window at a shuttered restaurant is going to wait.
That’s not criticism. That’s math. And it’s the same math that has always driven demand for private security in Memphis. The pandemic just turned up the pressure.
The Pay Problem
Guards classified as essential workers are still showing up. They’re driving to sites at hospitals, at warehouse gates, at grocery store entrances. They’re standing within arm’s reach of strangers who may or may not be carrying a virus that nobody fully understands yet.
And most of them are making between $10 and $13 an hour.
This isn’t new. Memphis security guard wages have sat well below the national average for years. The TDCI licensing requirements for unarmed guards are minimal: a background check, eight hours of training, and registration through the Private Protective Services division. Armed guards need more training and must qualify at a range, which bumps pay into the $14 to $18 range at most firms.
Right now, these workers are being asked to do things that look a lot like healthcare screening with none of the healthcare pay, none of the healthcare benefits, and none of the personal protective equipment that hospitals hand out to clinical staff.
I talked to a guard working the entrance at a Midtown medical facility on Monday. He had a cloth mask his wife made him and a pair of latex gloves he bought at Walgreens. His company hadn’t provided PPE yet. He’d been doing temperature checks on patients for five days.
“I need the hours,” he told me. “I got two kids.”
That’s the calculus right now. Workers who need the paycheck versus companies scrambling to find enough masks and thermometers to keep operations running. Nobody in this equation has extra cash to throw around.
What Happens to the Small Firms?
The security companies most at risk aren’t the national chains. Allied Universal and Securitas have the balance sheets to absorb a few months of contract losses. They’ll restructure, they’ll shift personnel from dead sites to surging ones, and they’ll survive.
The firms I worry about are the local operators. Memphis has dozens of small security companies. Five employees, maybe ten. Owner-operated outfits that landed contracts through personal relationships and competitive pricing. They don’t have credit lines or corporate reserves. When three of their six clients cancel in the same week, the math stops working.
Some will apply for the Paycheck Protection Program loans that Congress just authorized. Whether they actually get the money, and whether it arrives fast enough, is a different question. The SBA’s lending infrastructure was not built to process millions of applications in two weeks.
A few companies are trying to pivot. I know of at least two local firms that started marketing “COVID security” packages this week. Temperature screening teams. Social distancing enforcement. Occupancy management for stores still open under the 50% capacity rule. Smart thinking, and exactly the kind of work the market needs right now.
Still, pivoting takes money you might not have and time the virus won’t give you.
The City Needs Guards More Than It Knows
Memphis has always been a city where private security fills gaps that public law enforcement can’t cover. That was true during the crime spikes of the 2000s. It was true during the flood years. It’s true now, in a way that feels more urgent than anything I’ve covered in 18 years of reporting on this industry.
Hospitals need screening staff. Warehouses need access control adapted to pandemic protocols. Grocery stores need crowd management. And thousands of empty buildings from Raleigh to Hickory Hill need someone checking the doors.
The Safer-at-Home order runs through at least June 1. I think most people in the industry expect some version of restricted operations to last longer. If that happens, the question isn’t whether Memphis needs its security workforce. The question is whether the security workforce can afford to keep showing up.
Right now, I don’t have a good answer. Neither does anyone else I’ve talked to this week.