The line at the Walmart on Covington Pike started forming at 4:30 a.m. last Saturday. Not for a doorbuster sale. For entry. A security guard with a clicker stood at the front door, counting heads, while a second guard handed out disposable masks to shoppers who showed up without one. Inside, the store was at roughly half its normal capacity, and it still felt crowded.
This is what holiday retail looks like in Memphis in 2020. And it’s about to get a whole lot more complicated.
Black Friday is one week away, and every major retailer in Shelby County is scrambling to figure out how to run the biggest shopping weekend of the year under capacity restrictions that cut their floor traffic in half. The Shelby County Health Department’s directives cap retail stores at 50% occupancy. Governor Bill Lee hasn’t issued a statewide mask mandate, leaving enforcement to local authorities and, increasingly, to the private security guards standing at store entrances.
Security Guards Doing Two Jobs at Once
For decades, the holiday security playbook at Memphis retail locations was straightforward: watch for shoplifters, manage crowds, keep the parking lot safe. That playbook got thrown out sometime around March.
Now the guards stationed at Wolfchase Galleria, Oak Court Mall, and Southland Mall are doing something their training never anticipated. They’re counting customers. They’re asking people to put on masks. They’re managing outdoor queues in the November cold, trying to keep shoppers spaced six feet apart while those shoppers get increasingly irritated about standing outside a store they used to walk right into.
“We’ve essentially doubled the job description without doubling the pay,” said one security supervisor at a Germantown Parkway retail center who asked not to be named. “My guys are doing loss prevention and public health enforcement at the same time. Some of them signed up to be security officers, not mask police.”
The tension is real. Shelby County’s health directive requires face coverings inside businesses, and while most shoppers comply, the ones who don’t create confrontations that security personnel have to manage. Several Memphis-area retailers have reported verbal altercations between staff and customers over mask requirements since the summer. One Target location on Colonial Road had to call MPD twice in October after mask disputes escalated.
The Math Problem at Wolfchase
Wolfchase Galleria, the largest enclosed mall in the Memphis metro area, normally handles somewhere north of 60,000 visitors on Black Friday weekend. Cut that in half and you’ve got a logistical headache that no mall manager has ever dealt with.
The mall, located at 2760 North Germantown Parkway, closed entirely back in March when owner Simon Property Group shuttered all 209 of its shopping centers nationwide. It reopened in May with new protocols: sanitizing stations, directional floor markers, and capacity monitoring. Those protocols worked fine during the slow summer months. They haven’t been tested against holiday traffic.
Mall management told the Commercial Appeal they’ll have extra security on-site to provide masks to guests and enforce distancing. They’ve also set up a “retail to go” parking area for curbside pickup, trying to siphon off some foot traffic before it reaches the doors.
Oak Court Mall in East Memphis faces similar challenges on a smaller scale. Southland Mall in Whitehaven, which was already struggling with vacancy before COVID, has fewer capacity concerns simply because it draws smaller crowds. Still, all three properties are hiring additional security for the season.
Black Friday Won’t Look Like Black Friday
The traditional 5 a.m. stampede through sliding doors? That’s gone. Most major retailers figured out months ago that cramming hundreds of shoppers through a single entrance at the same moment was a recipe for a superspreader event and a PR disaster.
Walmart started rolling out its “Black Friday Deals for Days” event on November 4, spreading what used to be a single day of doorbusters across multiple weeks. The company’s Shelby County locations on Covington Pike, on Austin Peay Highway, and near Raleigh are all operating with metering systems at entrances. Security guards use handheld counters and radio communication to track occupancy in real time.
Target took a similar approach, launching deals in late October and promising that everything available in-store would also be online. The Target on Poplar Avenue in East Memphis, one of the highest-traffic locations in the chain’s Memphis market, has been running a reservation system for high-demand items to avoid lines.
Kroger, which doesn’t typically deal with Black Friday chaos, is facing its own version of the problem. Grocery stores have been managing capacity limits since spring, and the Thanksgiving shopping rush will push those systems hard. Kroger’s Union Avenue and Germantown locations already employ security during peak hours to manage entry flow.
The Hiring Scramble
Every year, Memphis retailers bring on seasonal security staff for the holidays. This year, the demand has spiked and the available workforce has shrunk.
Guard companies across Shelby County report that requests for temporary holiday security are up 30 to 40 percent over last year. The reason isn’t just COVID compliance. Regular crime hasn’t taken the holidays off. Memphis is on pace for more than 330 homicides in 2020, shattering the previous record of roughly 228. Property crime, auto theft, and shoplifting have all tracked upward. Retailers need more security at a time when finding warm bodies to fill posts is harder than ever.
The problem is partly financial. Entry-level security guards in Memphis earn between $10 and $13 an hour, which puts them in direct competition with Amazon’s $15 starting wage at its Memphis-area fulfillment centers. Several security contractors told me they’ve lost guards to warehouse jobs since the summer, and the holiday hiring crunch has made it worse.
“We’re offering sign-on bonuses for the first time in 20 years,” one local security company owner said. “A hundred bucks if you can start this week. That’s how tight the market is.”
The Rules Nobody Agrees On
Here’s where it gets messy. Tennessee’s COVID enforcement is a patchwork. Governor Lee granted mayors and county health departments authority to issue mask mandates back in July, and Shelby County’s Health Director issued directives requiring face coverings in public indoor spaces. The county also set the 50% capacity rule for retail.
Enforcement, though, falls into a gray area. The Shelby County Health Department can issue fines, but in practice, they’ve focused on businesses that openly flout the rules rather than individual shoppers. That leaves security guards as the de facto enforcers on the ground, and they have zero legal authority to compel compliance.
A guard can ask someone to put on a mask. They can offer a disposable mask. They can tell someone the store’s policy requires a face covering. They can ask someone to leave if they refuse. What they can’t do is physically force compliance, detain someone, or issue any kind of citation.
This creates an impossible dynamic. Retailers tell their security teams to enforce the mask policy. The guards have no enforcement mechanism beyond asking politely. And some customers treat the request as a personal affront, launching into arguments about constitutional rights, medical exemptions, and government overreach. The guard just wants to get through an eight-hour shift without getting screamed at.
What’s Actually Working
Some Memphis retailers have figured out approaches that reduce friction. The Costco on Germantown Parkway assigns a dedicated “greeter” at the entrance whose only job is mask distribution. It’s positioned as customer service, not enforcement, and it works. Almost nobody refuses a free mask when it’s handed to them with a smile.
Several stores along the Poplar corridor have moved to appointment-based shopping for high-value departments (electronics, jewelry). It controls capacity naturally without anyone standing at the door with a clicker.
Drive-up and curbside pickup options have exploded. Best Buy on Winchester Road, HomeGoods near Carriage Crossing, and nearly every big-box retailer in the Cordova area now treat curbside as a primary sales channel rather than an afterthought.
The real question isn’t whether Memphis retailers can survive one strange Black Friday. They can. The question is how long this goes on. Shelby County’s COVID case numbers are climbing again as Thanksgiving approaches, and tighter restrictions could land at any moment. If the health department drops retail capacity to 25 percent (as some Tennessee counties have already done), the economics of keeping a store open become genuinely difficult.
For the security industry, this holiday season is a proving ground. Guards who can handle mask disputes with professionalism, manage entry lines without losing their temper, and still keep an eye out for shoplifters are going to be in demand long after the Christmas decorations come down. The companies that trained for this moment will pick up contracts. The ones that didn’t will lose them.
Nobody in Memphis retail security planned for 2020. The ones still standing in January will be the ones who adapted fastest.