Three days ago, Governor Bill Lee told Tennessee the stay-at-home order dies on April 30. Eighty-nine of the state’s 95 counties get the green light to reopen May 1. Restaurants can seat customers again. Retail stores can unlock their doors. Gyms, salons, and movie theaters can follow a week later.
Memphis isn’t one of those 89 counties.
Shelby County, with its 935,000 residents and a COVID-19 case count that keeps climbing past 2,000 confirmed infections, will stay under its own Safer-at-Home order through at least June 1. Mayor Jim Strickland made that clear on Monday. The city’s health department director, Dr. Alisa Haushalter, backed him up with numbers that don’t leave much room for argument.
For security companies operating across Tennessee, this creates a problem that no one in the industry has faced before. Half your client base wants guards back on site tomorrow. The other half is still dark, doors locked, parking lots empty. And the clients who are reopening? They want services that didn’t exist eight weeks ago.
A State Split Down the Middle
The governor’s executive order lays out a phased reopening tied to specific business types. Restaurants at 50% capacity by May 1. Retail stores with social distancing rules. Close-contact businesses like barbers and nail salons on May 6. Each phase carries restrictions, and somebody has to enforce them.
That somebody, in a lot of cases, is going to be a security guard.
Talk to any operations manager at a mid-size security firm right now and you’ll hear the same thing: clients are calling with requests that sound nothing like what the contract covers. A property management company in Nashville wants guards to take the temperature of every person entering a 12-story office building. A retail chain with locations in Knoxville and Chattanooga needs someone stationed at the front door counting heads and turning people away when the store hits 50% capacity.
These aren’t traditional security functions. A guard trained to watch cameras, patrol a parking lot, and write incident reports is now expected to point an infrared thermometer at someone’s forehead and make a judgment call about whether that person gets inside.
I called six security company owners across the state this week. Five told me they don’t have written protocols for any of this. The sixth, who runs a firm out of Clarksville, said he spent last weekend writing a temperature screening policy from scratch because his biggest client, a manufacturing plant in Montgomery County, gave him 72 hours’ notice.
Memphis Stays Locked Down, Sort Of
Here in Shelby County, the picture is different. Strickland’s order keeps most non-essential businesses closed through June 1. MPD Director Michael Rallings has his officers enforcing the order, and the health department has been issuing cease-and-desist letters to businesses that jumped the gun.
Still, essential businesses have been open this entire time. Grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, logistics facilities. FedEx never stopped moving packages through its Memphis hub. The warehouses along Airways Boulevard kept running three shifts.
Security companies serving these essential clients have stayed busy. Some have been busier than usual, picking up extra shifts at distribution centers that ramped up operations to handle the surge in online orders. The problem isn’t that there’s no work in Memphis. It’s that the work has changed in ways that strain staffing and training.
One security director at a major grocery chain told me his company added a “door monitor” position at every Memphis location in late March. The job: stand at the entrance, make sure customers are wearing masks, and limit the number of people inside to whatever the fire marshal’s occupancy limit says, divided by two. His company had to pull guards from other posts to fill these spots. The overnight patrol at a strip mall in Whitehaven lost its guard so that a Kroger in Cordova could have someone counting shoppers.
The Training Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About
Tennessee’s Private Protective Services Act requires security guards to complete training before they can work. The specific requirements vary depending on whether you’re armed or unarmed, and the TDCI oversees licensing and compliance. What the law doesn’t cover, because nobody imagined this scenario, is pandemic-specific training.
Temperature screening involves potential HIPAA considerations. Mask enforcement puts guards in confrontational situations with members of the public who view face coverings as a political issue, not a health measure. Capacity management requires guards to physically prevent entry, which raises questions about the use-of-force continuum that most unarmed guards have limited training on.
I spoke with a training coordinator at one of Memphis’s larger security firms. She asked me not to name the company. She said they’ve been running four-hour COVID-specific training sessions over Zoom for the past two weeks, covering everything from how to properly use a no-touch thermometer to de-escalation techniques for people who refuse to wear masks. She estimated that 40% of their active guard force has completed the training. The other 60% are either on furlough or working posts where the new protocols haven’t been implemented yet.
“We’re building the plane while we’re flying it,” she said. “And we’re doing it on Zoom, which is its own kind of terrible.”
The Financial Squeeze
Security is a thin-margin business in good times. Guard companies typically operate on margins between 3% and 8% after payroll, insurance, licensing, and overhead. COVID-19 has compressed those margins from both sides.
On the revenue side, companies lost contracts when clients shut down. A security firm that provided overnight patrol for five restaurant locations in the Overton Square area saw all five accounts go dark in March. That’s revenue gone with no clear return date. Downtown Memphis, which normally buzzes with Grizzlies games, concerts at the FedEx Forum, and foot traffic along Beale Street, has been a ghost town since mid-March. Security contracts tied to those venues evaporated overnight.
On the cost side, expenses are going up. PPE for guards isn’t cheap. Thermometers, face shields, gloves, hand sanitizer stations. One company owner in East Memphis told me he’s spending $1,200 a month on PPE supplies for his team of 35 guards, a line item that didn’t exist in February.
Then there’s the staffing calculation. Some guards don’t want to come back. They’re making more on Tennessee’s expanded unemployment benefits, which add $600 per week from the federal CARES Act to the state’s maximum of $275. A guard making $12 an hour, which is common in Memphis, takes home roughly $480 a week before taxes. Unemployment with the federal supplement pays $875. The math isn’t complicated.
What Reopening Actually Looks Like
When Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and the rest of the state’s 89 counties flip the switch on May 1, security companies will face a scramble. Clients that have been dormant for six weeks will want guards on site immediately. Training that should have happened over months will need to happen over days. Equipment that should have been ordered in March will need to arrive by next week.
The companies that prepared for this are going to be in the strongest position. The ones that spent April waiting for the governor’s announcement without building out COVID-specific protocols, without sourcing PPE, without running training sessions for their teams, are going to struggle.
And Memphis? Memphis waits. Strickland and Rallings have made it clear that Shelby County operates on its own timeline. June 1 is the earliest target, and even that depends on case counts and hospital capacity.
For security companies with operations on both sides of that divide, the next six weeks are going to feel like running two different businesses. In Nashville, you’re managing a flood of reopening requests. In Memphis, you’re still managing skeleton crews at essential businesses while some of your best guards collect unemployment from home.
Nobody trained for this. The companies that figure it out fastest will be the ones still standing when this thing finally ends. Whenever that is.