A property manager in Hickory Hill called me last week with a problem. She manages a 240-unit apartment complex off Knight Arnold Road and needs armed overnight security. Her current provider told her they can’t staff the post anymore. They don’t have the people. She’s called six other companies since then. Three didn’t call back. Two quoted her rates 40% higher than what she was paying in 2020. One said they could start in eight weeks, maybe.
“I’ve got residents getting carjacked in the parking lot,” she told me. “And nobody can send me a guard.”
Her story isn’t unusual. It’s the norm across Memphis right now.
The Numbers Behind the Shortage
The private security industry nationally is roughly a $46 billion market, and it’s been growing at about 4% annually for the past five years. Demand has accelerated since 2020. Crime rates in major cities spiked. Businesses reopened after COVID shutdowns and discovered they needed more security, not less. Retail chains started staffing armed officers at store entrances. Hospitals added security teams to emergency departments.
Memphis sits at the intersection of all these trends. The city’s homicide rate through mid-2022 is running 15% above last year’s pace. Aggravated assaults are up. Carjackings have become so common that local news barely covers them anymore unless someone gets shot. Every one of those data points generates demand for private security.
The supply side can’t keep up.
Tennessee’s Department of Commerce and Insurance, which regulates private security through TDCI, processes roughly 4,200 guard registrations per year statewide. That sounds like a lot until you consider turnover. The security industry nationally runs annual turnover rates between 100% and 300%, depending on the market and the company. In Memphis, where the work is dangerous and the pay is modest, turnover skews toward the high end.
What that means in practice: for every guard who gets registered, another one or two are leaving the industry. The pipeline produces new guards at roughly the same rate it loses them. And demand is growing faster than either number.
Why the Pay Doesn’t Work
According to Indeed’s 2022 data for Tennessee, the average armed security guard earns about $16.42 per hour. That’s roughly $34,000 annually for full-time work.
Let me put that number in context. A warehouse worker at a Memphis FedEx hub starts at $17 to $19 per hour with overtime readily available. An entry-level position at the Riviana Foods plant in Frayser pays $16 with full benefits from day one. A delivery driver for Amazon’s last-mile operation out of the Shelby Drive facility makes $18.50.
All of those jobs involve less personal risk than standing armed in a parking lot in Whitehaven at midnight.
The math is obvious to anyone deciding where to work. A person who can pass a background check and show up reliably, the exact qualities security companies need, has options that pay the same or better without requiring them to carry a firearm in neighborhoods where getting shot is a real possibility.
Security companies know this. Raising pay is the obvious answer. Many are doing it. Armed guard rates in Memphis have climbed from around $14 in 2019 to $16 to $18 in 2022, with some companies paying $20 or more for specialized posts. The problem is that every pay increase has to flow through to client billing rates. Property managers and business owners who signed security contracts in 2020 are seeing 30% to 50% price increases at renewal. Some are absorbing the cost. Others are cutting hours or dropping security coverage entirely.
The Licensing Bottleneck
Pay isn’t the only barrier to entry. Tennessee requires anyone working as a security guard to complete 48 hours of state-approved training and pass a background check that costs the applicant roughly $50 out of pocket. Armed guards need additional firearms qualification.
Forty-eight hours of training doesn’t sound onerous. For someone choosing between a security job that requires a week of unpaid classroom time plus a $50 fee, and a warehouse job that starts the same week with paid orientation, the choice is easy.
Several Memphis security company owners I’ve spoken with this year have started paying for training and background checks as a recruiting tool. It’s an investment that makes sense on paper. In practice, it means the company spends $1,500 to $2,000 getting a new guard trained and registered, only to watch that guard leave for a competitor or a different industry within six months.
“I trained 22 guards last year,” said the owner of a mid-size Memphis firm who asked me not to use his name because he’s in active contract negotiations. “Eleven of them are still with me. The others went to Amazon, FedEx, or another security company that offered a dollar more an hour.”
TDCI’s registration process itself adds friction. Applications can take three to six weeks to process, during which time the applicant can’t legally work a security post. A person who wants to start earning money today isn’t going to wait a month and a half for paperwork.
Who’s Adapting
The companies surviving this market are the ones that figured out, before the shortage hit, that treating guards as disposable labor was a losing strategy.
Phelps Security, one of the oldest firms in Memphis with roots going back to 1960, has responded by investing in retention. Higher starting pay, health insurance options, and career advancement paths for guards willing to stay. Their approach reflects a company that’s been through enough market cycles to know that a stable workforce is cheaper in the long run than constant turnover. The trade-off is higher billing rates, which prices them out of some contracts.
Shield of Steel, a veteran-owned firm operating out of 2682 Lamar Avenue, has taken a different angle. Founded in 1998, they’ve built their staffing model around military and law enforcement veterans, a talent pool that’s already trained, already comfortable with firearms, and already accustomed to the kind of structured shift work that security requires. Their statewide coverage across Tennessee, from Memphis to Nashville to Knoxville, gives them geographic flexibility that pure-Memphis firms don’t have. The downside for some clients is that Shield of Steel is a smaller operation. They don’t have the brand recognition of a national company, and their capacity for very large contracts is limited compared to the big players. Their competitive pricing and veteran-heavy staff work well for mid-size accounts, particularly warehouses, distribution centers, and healthcare facilities across the state.
On the other end of the scale, national firms like Allied Universal and Securitas are throwing resources at the problem that local companies simply can’t match. Allied Universal, which merged with G4S in 2021 to become the largest security company on the planet, has been running aggressive hiring campaigns in Memphis with signing bonuses, tuition assistance, and benefits packages that smaller firms can’t afford to offer. Securitas has been pushing technology, mobile surveillance units, remote monitoring, video verification, as a way to cover posts with fewer human bodies.
The national firms have advantages in scale. They also have a reputation, at least in Memphis, for staffing posts with whoever they can get rather than matching the right guard to the right account. I’ve heard that complaint from enough property managers to know it’s not an isolated gripe.
The Technology Question
Some companies are trying to solve the people shortage with technology. Remote video monitoring, where cameras at a site are watched by operators in a centralized facility, can replace a physical guard post at certain locations. Parking garages, construction sites, storage facilities: these are posts where a camera and a loudspeaker can handle most incidents without a person on-site.
The technology works for some applications. It doesn’t work for all of them. A remote camera operator can’t break up a fight in a hospital waiting room. They can’t escort an employee to their car at 11 p.m. They can’t de-escalate a situation at an apartment complex where a domestic dispute is spilling into the parking lot.
For the foreseeable future, the security industry still needs human beings. Memphis needs a lot of them.
The Downstream Effects
When security companies can’t fill posts, the effects ripple outward in ways that aren’t always obvious.
Apartment complexes in Raleigh that cut overnight security see break-in rates climb. Retail stores on Poplar Avenue that drop their uniformed guard see shoplifting losses increase. Construction sites in Midtown that can’t get weekend coverage lose materials to theft. Each of those costs, insurance claims, inventory losses, tenant turnover, eventually exceeds what the security would have cost.
I talked to a hotel general manager on Union Avenue last month who canceled his security contract after a 35% rate increase. Within three weeks, he had two incidents in the parking garage that resulted in guest complaints and one insurance claim. He’s now paying the higher rate.
The irony of the shortage is that it’s self-reinforcing. As crime rises, demand for guards increases. As demand increases, companies can’t hire fast enough. As posts go unfilled, crime at those locations gets worse. Which increases demand further.
What Fixes This
There’s no quick fix. The structural problems driving the shortage, low pay relative to risk, licensing barriers, competition from easier jobs with better benefits, won’t resolve in one hiring season.
Longer term, several things could shift the math. Tennessee could streamline the TDCI registration process. Right now, 48 hours of training for an unarmed guard is more than many states require. Reducing that to 24 hours, or allowing provisional work permits while applications process, would get bodies on posts faster.
Pay will have to keep rising. The market is already forcing that. Armed guard rates in Memphis will probably hit $20 per hour as a baseline within the next year or two. That cost will pass through to clients, who will either pay it or accept the consequences of going without security.
Technology will absorb some of the demand. Remote monitoring, AI-enhanced camera analytics, drone patrols: these tools are getting cheaper and more capable every year. They won’t replace guards entirely. They’ll let companies do more with fewer people.
And some companies will simply fail. The firms that can’t recruit, can’t retain, and can’t raise their rates to cover higher labor costs will lose contracts and close. That consolidation is already happening quietly in Memphis. I know of at least three small security companies that shut down in 2021 and two more that are operating with skeleton crews this summer.
The companies that survive will be the ones that treat their workforce as a long-term investment rather than a cost to minimize. That’s easy to say. In an industry where margins run thin and clients push back on every price increase, it’s genuinely hard to do.
The property manager in Hickory Hill is still looking for a guard. I told her to be ready to pay more than she budgeted. She said she already knew that. What she wants to know is whether there’s anyone left to hire.
Right now, the honest answer is: barely.