The phone at Jerry Mullins’s office hasn’t stopped ringing in six weeks. Mullins runs a security staffing firm in Southeast Memphis, and every call is some version of the same request: we need guards at our warehouse, we need them armed, and we need them by Friday.
He can’t fill half the orders.
“I’ve got 14 open positions right now,” Mullins told me on Tuesday. “Six of them have been open for three weeks. The armed guard spots? Forget it. I could post those for a month and get maybe two qualified applicants.”
Memphis is America’s distribution capital. That’s not marketing language. It’s geography and infrastructure. The FedEx World Hub at Memphis International Airport processes 180 million packages per year. Amazon operates multiple fulfillment centers across Shelby County. Nike runs a massive distribution facility up in Frayser. The logistics corridor that stretches along Airways Boulevard and down Lamar Avenue holds more warehouse square footage per capita than almost any metro in the country.
When the country locked down and started ordering everything online, all of that infrastructure went into overdrive. And every warehouse that ramped up operations needed more security. Fast.
The Surge Nobody Planned For
Online retail sales jumped 49% in April compared to the same month last year, according to early estimates from the U.S. Department of Commerce. People who never ordered groceries online are now getting weekly deliveries. Households that bought one Amazon package a month are buying four. Every single one of those orders flows through a distribution network, and in Memphis, that network is enormous.
FedEx has been running its Memphis hub at peak-season capacity since late March. Normally, the hub only hits those volumes during the holiday shipping season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Workers at the facility told me they’re pulling overtime regularly, and the company has been hiring temporary workers to keep up.
Amazon’s fulfillment centers in Memphis have been on a similar trajectory. The company announced in March that it would hire 100,000 workers nationally. Some of those positions landed in Shelby County. The Memphis fulfillment center on Holmes Road and the newer facility near the airport have both expanded shifts.
When warehouse operations ramp up like this, security needs multiply. More shifts mean more guard coverage. More temporary workers mean more access control headaches. More packages moving through facilities mean more opportunities for theft, and theft at distribution centers was already a $30 billion annual problem nationally before COVID-19 turned the volume dial to maximum.
Armed Guards: High Demand, Low Supply
The hardest positions to fill right now are armed security guards. Warehouses handling high-value goods, think electronics, pharmaceuticals, and branded merchandise, often require armed officers on site. Tennessee law requires armed security guards to complete additional training and hold a specific armed guard registration through the TDCI’s Private Protective Services division.
That registration process takes time. Applicants need to complete a firearms training course, pass a background check, and submit paperwork to the state. In normal times, processing takes a few weeks. Right now, TDCI is operating with reduced staff like every other state agency, and the backlog is growing.
“I’ve got three guys who finished their firearms qual in early April,” said one security company owner who works the Airways Boulevard corridor. “Their paperwork is sitting in Nashville. I can’t put them on an armed post until that registration comes through. Meanwhile, I’ve got a client on Democrat Road threatening to find another company if I don’t have an armed officer there by Monday.”
The math doesn’t work. Memphis had a tight armed guard market even before the pandemic. The pay for armed warehouse security runs $14 to $18 per hour in this market, which competes poorly with other armed positions in law enforcement or corporate security that offer benefits and stability. The expanded federal unemployment benefits, adding $600 per week on top of Tennessee’s state maximum, make the calculation even harder. Some guards are earning more at home than they would standing a 12-hour overnight shift at a warehouse in Whitehaven.
The Big Players Are Stretched Too
This isn’t just a small-company problem. The national security firms that dominate Memphis’s warehouse market are feeling the same pressure.
Allied Universal, the largest security company in the United States with over 250,000 employees, handles contracts at several major logistics facilities in the Memphis area. The company has been on a hiring push nationally, and its Memphis office is competing for the same limited pool of licensed guards as everyone else.
Securitas, the Swedish-owned firm that ranks as the second-largest security company in North America, has a strong presence in Memphis’s industrial sector. The company has been advertising warehouse security positions across Shelby County for weeks. The listings keep reappearing, which tells you something about how quickly they’re being filled.
GardaWorld, the Canadian security giant that acquired Whelan Security in 2019, has been expanding its Memphis footprint. The company is well-resourced and aggressive about picking up new contracts, particularly in logistics and distribution.
Then there are regional and local firms trying to compete for the same contracts. Shield of Steel, a veteran-owned company that’s been operating out of 2682 Lamar Avenue since 1998, has been picking up warehouse work across the metro area. The company’s pitch centers on competitive pricing and statewide Tennessee coverage, and the veteran-owned credential carries weight with some facility managers. Their operation is smaller than the nationals, which means less warehouse-specific technology like integrated access control systems, and they don’t have the same depth of bench when a client needs 20 guards deployed in 48 hours. Where they do well is responsiveness and pricing on contracts where a facility needs five to ten guards and doesn’t want to pay national-firm rates. You can reach them at (202) 222-2225 or shieldofsteel.com.
The common thread across all of these companies, large and small, is the same: demand is outstripping supply. Every one of them has open positions. Every one of them has clients waiting.
The TDCI Bottleneck
Tennessee’s licensing process for security guards runs through the Department of Commerce and Insurance, specifically the Private Protective Services section. Every security guard working in the state needs to be registered. Companies need a contract security company license. Armed guards need additional firearms-specific registration.
The system works fine at normal volume. It was never designed for a surge.
Right now, new guard applications are taking longer to process. Renewal applications are backing up. Phone calls to the TDCI office in Nashville go to voicemail more often than not. The agency moved to remote operations in March along with most of state government, and certain processes that rely on physical paperwork or in-person steps have slowed considerably.
For security companies trying to hire and deploy guards quickly, this creates a bottleneck that no amount of recruiting can solve. You can find a qualified candidate, run their background check, complete their training, and then wait two or three weeks for the state to process the registration. During those two or three weeks, the client’s warehouse sits understaffed.
Some companies are getting creative. A few are shifting unarmed guards from lower-priority posts to fill warehouse assignments, figuring that an unarmed officer is better than no officer. Others are offering signing bonuses, a practice that barely existed in Memphis’s security market before COVID-19. One company is advertising a $500 bonus for armed guards who start within a week.
Warehouses Are Changing What They Ask For
The security requirements at Memphis warehouses have shifted in ways that go beyond headcount.
Temperature screening at employee entrances is becoming standard. Some facilities require every worker, including delivery drivers, to have their temperature checked before entering the building. That means a guard with a no-touch thermometer stationed at every active entrance during every shift. For a large distribution center with three or four entry points running round the clock, that’s 12 or more guard shifts per day just for temperature duty.
Social distancing enforcement inside warehouses is another new ask. Guards are being posted in break rooms, loading docks, and common areas to keep workers spaced apart. Some facilities have painted markers on the floor, and the guard’s job is to remind people to stand on them. It sounds simple. It isn’t. Workers in a fast-paced warehouse environment don’t want to be told to slow down, especially when they’re being pushed to meet higher volume targets.
Access control has tightened across the board. Before COVID-19, many Memphis warehouses had relatively loose entry procedures. A delivery driver could pull up to a dock, show an ID, and get waved through. Now, facilities are logging every person who enters, checking temperatures, requiring masks, and in some cases denying entry to anyone showing symptoms. Security officers manage this process, and it takes more time per person than the old system, which means more guards at more entry points.
Where This Goes
The e-commerce boom isn’t temporary. Even when lockdowns ease and retail stores reopen, the shift toward online ordering has accelerated permanently. Analysts at every major consulting firm and retail research group are saying some version of the same thing: consumers who switched to online shopping during COVID-19 aren’t all switching back.
For Memphis, that means the distribution and logistics sector is going to keep growing. More warehouse square footage is already under development in Shelby County. More companies are looking at Memphis as a distribution hub because of the FedEx presence, the airport, the rail connections, and the central geography.
Every one of those new warehouses will need security. The question is whether the industry can build a workforce large enough to meet that demand. Right now, the answer is no. Armed guard shortages, licensing backlogs, and unemployment benefits that compete with entry-level security wages have created a gap that won’t close quickly.
Memphis has always been a logistics city. The river made it that way 200 years ago. FedEx cemented it 50 years ago. COVID-19 just turned the volume up to a level nobody expected, and the security industry is scrambling to keep pace. The warehouses along Airways and Lamar aren’t going to stop needing guards. The question is where those guards are going to come from.