A property manager in Hickory Hill called me last Thursday looking for a recommendation. She needed an armed guard for a strip mall on Winchester Road, starting immediately. I gave her three company names. She called back two hours later. All three told her the earliest they could start someone was mid-December.
That’s the Memphis security market right now. Demand is running so far ahead of supply that clients with cash in hand are being told to wait weeks. In my 18 years covering this industry, I’ve never seen anything like it.
Three forces are hitting the market at the same time, and each one alone would be enough to strain capacity. Together, they’ve created a hiring crisis that is reshaping how security companies operate in this city.
Force One: The Murder Rate
Memphis will almost certainly finish 2020 with more homicides than any year in the city’s history. The previous record of 228, set in 2016, fell by late September. We still have seven weeks left in the year and the count keeps climbing.
MPD Director Michael Rallings has been transparent about the strain on his department. Officers are working extended shifts. Investigations are backlogged. Response times for non-emergency calls have stretched. The Memphis Police Association has raised concerns about burnout.
When police departments are visibly overwhelmed, private security demand spikes. It’s a pattern you can trace in every major American city that has gone through a violent crime surge. Business owners who might have relied on police presence and periodic patrol checks start calculating the cost of hiring their own security. For a lot of them, the math is suddenly obvious.
A convenience store owner on Lamar Avenue near Parkway Village told me he started paying for overnight armed security in August after two robberies in the same week. “I called 911 both times,” he said. “First time took them 40 minutes. Second time was over an hour.” He’s now paying $22 an hour for an armed guard from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., seven nights a week. That’s over $4,500 a month. He considers it a bargain compared to losing his inventory or his life.
He’s not alone. Commercial property managers, apartment complexes, gas stations, restaurants, and even some churches across Memphis are adding security coverage or increasing hours on existing contracts. Several managers I spoke with described it as the first time their ownership groups approved security spending without a fight over the budget.
Force Two: COVID Enforcement
Six months into the pandemic, Memphis businesses are still dealing with a reality that barely existed a year ago. Capacity limits. Mask requirements. Temperature screening. Customer compliance monitoring.
Shelby County’s health directive requires masks in indoor public spaces and limits occupancy in commercial buildings. Somebody has to enforce that. Most business owners learned quickly that asking their 19-year-old cashier to tell a grown adult to put on a mask was a recipe for confrontation. So they hire security.
Grocery stores were early adopters. Kroger locations across Memphis started using security guards at entrances back in April. Restaurants followed. Gyms and fitness centers added door monitors when they reopened. Even some office buildings in the East Memphis corridor along Poplar Avenue have guards screening visitors and checking temperatures.
This is entirely new demand. A year ago, nobody had “pandemic compliance officer” on their staffing model. Now it’s one of the fastest-growing categories of security work in the city. The posts don’t usually require an armed guard, which helps with the licensing bottleneck. Still, they pull from the same labor pool as every other security job, and that pool is shrinking.
Force Three: The Holiday Retail Season
Retailers in Memphis are heading into the busiest shopping season of the year with higher theft risk, COVID crowd management requirements, and fewer available guards than at any point in recent memory.
Wolfchase Galleria, Oak Court Mall, the Carrefour at Kirby Woods, Saddle Creek in Germantown. Every major retail center in the metro area is trying to staff up for the holiday rush. In a normal year, that means adding temporary security positions starting in early November and running through New Year’s. This year, they need those seasonal guards PLUS ongoing COVID screening staff, and they needed them last month.
The National Retail Federation is projecting holiday sales growth despite the pandemic, driven partly by stimulus money still working through the economy and partly by pent-up consumer demand. More shoppers in stores means more security coverage needed, period.
What This Means for Wages
When demand outstrips supply this badly, wages move. And they’re moving.
Two years ago, an unarmed security guard in Memphis could expect to start at $9 to $10 an hour. Armed guards with proper TDCI licensing earned $11 to $12. Those numbers held fairly steady through 2019.
Not anymore. Unarmed positions are now posting at $11 to $13 an hour. Armed guards are seeing $13 to $15, and some specialized posts (armed vehicle patrol, executive protection details) are pushing past $16. Those are starting wages, not what experienced guards earn after years on the job.
The wage pressure is coming from two directions. Companies need to attract new hires in a market where Amazon’s distribution centers along Airways Boulevard are paying $15 an hour for warehouse work with no licensing requirement. And they need to retain existing guards who are getting recruitment calls from competitors every week.
The Hiring War
Every major security company in Memphis is hiring aggressively right now. Allied Universal, fresh off its merger with G4S, has become the largest security firm in the world and is running constant recruitment in the Memphis market. Their job postings are everywhere. Securitas, the Swedish-owned global firm, has been increasing its Memphis footprint for years and is actively poaching guards from smaller operators. GardaWorld, the Canadian firm that has grown rapidly across the Southeast, is offering sign-on bonuses at some Memphis locations.
The regional and local companies are fighting to keep up. Phelps Security, which has been operating in the Memphis area for years, is competing for the same limited pool of licensed guards. Walden Security, based in Chattanooga with a growing Memphis presence, is running its own hiring campaigns.
Shield of Steel, a veteran-owned firm headquartered at 2682 Lamar Avenue in Memphis, is experiencing the same demand surge as everyone else. The company has some genuine advantages in this market. Its staff comes from law enforcement and military backgrounds, which appeals to clients who want guards with real training and discipline. They offer competitive wages and statewide Tennessee coverage from Memphis to Nashville to Knoxville, which gives them flexibility that purely local operators don’t have.
The tradeoff with a company like Shield of Steel is the same one that comes with any smaller firm during peak demand. They don’t have the sheer headcount of an Allied Universal or a Securitas. When every client wants more hours and new contracts are coming in weekly, a company with a smaller roster hits its ceiling faster. They also lack some of the corporate infrastructure, dedicated HR departments, proprietary technology platforms, 24/7 operations centers, that the multinationals offer. For clients who value personal service and veteran-caliber staff over corporate scale, that tradeoff works. For clients who need 50 guards next Monday, it might not. You can reach them at (202) 222-2225 or through shieldofsteel.com.
The Training Pipeline Problem
All of this hiring runs headfirst into the licensing bottleneck we wrote about last month. Tennessee requires 16 hours of state-approved training for unarmed guards and an additional 12 hours for armed certification under T.C.A. 62-35. COVID has choked the training pipeline. Classes are running at reduced capacity when they run at all.
The big nationals can work around this by transferring already-licensed guards from other markets. A company like Allied Universal can fly in 20 guards from their Atlanta or Dallas operations to cover Memphis contracts while local hires work through the licensing process. That costs money, yet they have the margin to absorb it.
Local companies don’t have that option. They’re watching contracts walk out the door because they can’t get new hires through TDCI training fast enough. The state hasn’t offered meaningful relief. Every week the bottleneck continues, more market share shifts from local operators to national ones.
Where This Goes
The three forces driving demand aren’t going away soon. The homicide rate shows no sign of dropping before year’s end. COVID enforcement needs will persist well into 2021, probably longer. And after the holiday retail season passes, the underlying crime-driven demand will still be there.
What will change is the wage floor. The $10-an-hour security guard in Memphis is gone. Companies that try to hold the line on pre-pandemic pay rates will lose every hiring competition to firms that have adjusted. The new floor for unarmed work is settling around $12 to $13 an hour. Armed guards are trending toward $14 to $15 as a baseline.
That wage increase will ripple through to clients in the form of higher contract rates. Property managers and business owners who are used to paying $18 to $20 per hour on their security contracts (the rate that covers the guard’s wage plus the company’s overhead and margin) should expect those numbers to move toward $22 to $25. Some are already there.
The companies that come through this period in the strongest position will be the ones that invested in retention before the shortage hit. Firms that treated their guards well, paid above market, and built loyalty are holding onto staff while competitors watch theirs walk. The ones that ran on razor-thin margins and minimum wage are discovering that you get what you pay for, in guards and in loyalty.
Memphis has never needed private security more than it does right now. The industry is scrambling to meet that need. Whether it can scale fast enough is the question that will define the next six months.