The Sunday before Labor Day, I counted fourteen security guards within two blocks of Beale Street. That’s not counting the Memphis Police officers stationed at the intersections or the plainclothes guys working the doors at Silky O’Sullivan’s and B.B. King’s Blues Club. For a holiday weekend that draws somewhere north of 100,000 visitors to downtown Memphis, fourteen felt thin.
Labor Day weekend is one of those calendar dates that keeps security company owners up at night. Not because anything specific is planned. Because everything is. The Beale Street Cigar Festival ran Friday through Sunday in Handy Park, pulling cigar enthusiasts from across the Southeast. The Southern Heritage Classic football game between Tennessee State and Jackson State packed the Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium on Saturday. Church picnics, neighborhood cookouts, and pop-up block parties filled in whatever gaps remained.
All of it needs security. And most of it needs more than what shows up.
The staffing crunch nobody talks about
Here’s the dirty math. A standard security post runs eight hours. A 72-hour holiday weekend means three shifts per post, per day, for three days. That’s nine shifts for one position. If you’re covering a festival with six posts, you need 54 guard shifts. Factor in no-shows, which are inevitable on holiday weekends, and you’re looking at booking 60 to 65 shifts just to keep one event staffed.
Now multiply that across every venue, bar, restaurant, and outdoor event in Memphis that wants coverage over Labor Day.
“We start recruiting for holiday weekends about six weeks out,” said one security operations manager who asked not to be named because his company was still finalizing contracts. “Even then, we’re pulling from part-time rosters and calling people who haven’t worked for us in months.”
The problem isn’t just bodies. It’s qualified bodies. Tennessee law requires every security guard to hold a valid registration card issued through the state’s Private Protective Services program. Armed guards need additional firearms certification. You can’t just grab your cousin who did a stint in the Army and throw him on a post at Tom Lee Park. Not legally, anyway.
Some companies do it anyway. We’ll get to that.
Beale Street: three blocks, a thousand headaches
Beale Street on a regular Saturday night is a controlled-chaos situation. Add a holiday weekend and a cigar festival, and the control part starts slipping.
The entertainment district runs roughly three blocks between Second and Fourth Streets, with most of the action concentrated around the clubs, restaurants, and open-air bars that line both sides. During peak hours on a holiday weekend, the street can hold 10,000 to 15,000 people. Some estimates from previous years run higher.
Each venue handles its own door security. That means different companies, different training standards, and different ideas about what counts as a threat. The bouncer at Alfred’s on Beale might be a certified guard with ten years of experience. The guy working the rope line two doors down might have gotten his registration card last Tuesday.
“The inconsistency is the risk,” said Terrence Blackmon, a retired Memphis Police lieutenant who now consults on event security. “You’ve got twenty venues within shouting distance of each other, and there’s no unified command structure for the private security side. MPD coordinates their people. The private guards are all independent.”
The Beale Street Cigar Festival added another layer. Handy Park sits right in the middle of the entertainment district, and festival organizers brought in their own security team. That team had to coordinate with the venue security on either side, the MPD officers working the street, and the Beale Street Management security that handles the district’s overall operations.
When I asked a festival organizer how that coordination worked, he paused for about five seconds. “It’s a lot of phone calls,” he said.
The Liberty Bowl challenge
The Southern Heritage Classic is its own animal. Tennessee State versus Jackson State draws around 50,000 fans to the Liberty Bowl, and the tailgating scene in the parking lots starts well before kickoff. Security at the stadium itself falls under the venue’s management team, while the surrounding areas are a patchwork.
Private security firms typically handle the parking lot operations, VIP areas, and afterparties. Some of these contracts pay well enough that companies pull guards from other posts to cover them, which creates gaps elsewhere in the city.
“It’s a zero-sum game on holiday weekends,” said a security company owner based in Whitehaven. “I can’t create guards out of thin air. If I send ten guys to the Classic, that’s ten guys not covering my regular retail contracts. And those retail clients still expect coverage.”
The tailgate areas present specific problems. Alcohol, large crowds, open spaces, and limited lighting after dark. Most security firms station guards at entry points and roving patrols through the lots, yet the sheer acreage around the Liberty Bowl makes full coverage almost impossible with typical staffing levels.
Then there’s the guns. Tennessee’s handgun carry permit laws mean a significant number of tailgaters are armed. Private security guards don’t have the authority to disarm permit holders on public property. Inside the stadium is different, and the parking lots exist in a gray zone that makes guards uncomfortable.
What the numbers look like
I talked to four security companies operating in the Memphis metro area in the week before Labor Day. None wanted to share exact contract values. The picture that emerged was consistent anyway.
A single guard post for an eight-hour shift runs between $18 and $28 per hour, depending on whether the guard is armed or unarmed. For a venue wanting 12-hour coverage over the three-day weekend, that’s roughly $650 to $1,000 per post for the weekend. Bigger operations that need five or six guards around the clock can expect bills between $8,000 and $15,000.
Those numbers have been climbing. Two companies told me their holiday rates went up 10 to 15 percent compared to 2018. The reason is simple supply and demand. There aren’t enough licensed guards to fill every post, so the ones who are available can charge more.
“We used to have trouble filling shifts at $12 an hour,” one company owner told me. “Now we’re paying $15, $16 for unarmed and $18 to $20 for armed, and we’re still short.”
The underground market
Here’s where things get uncomfortable.
Not every guard working a Memphis venue on Labor Day weekend had a valid Tennessee registration card. This isn’t speculation. It’s an open secret in the industry that some companies, particularly smaller outfits running five or ten guards, will put unregistered people on posts during high-demand periods.
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance, which oversees guard licensing through its Private Protective Services division, conducts compliance checks. Those checks don’t ramp up on holiday weekends the way staffing demands do. A company can run unlicensed guards for a three-day weekend and the odds of getting caught in real time are slim.
The fines, if they do get caught, can be stiff. State law allows penalties of $500 to $1,000 per violation, and each unlicensed guard on each shift counts as a separate violation. One company got hit with over $185,000 in fines after a state investigation found it had deployed more than 300 unlicensed guards over a six-month period.
That kind of enforcement action takes months to materialize. On a Friday night before Labor Day, with a client screaming for a body to stand at the front door, the temptation to cut corners is real.
What good coverage actually looks like
The better-run security operations I observed over the weekend shared a few things.
First, they had a clear chain of command. One supervisor per site, with a direct line to the client and to the company’s operations center. Guards knew who to call if something went sideways.
Second, they did pre-event walkthroughs. This sounds basic, and it is. But I watched one team spend 45 minutes walking the perimeter of an outdoor event space on Cooper-Young, checking sight lines, identifying choke points, and noting where the nearest hospital entrance was. The team lead told me they do this for every event, no matter how small.
Third, they communicated with local law enforcement. Not just showing up and hoping for the best, but actually sitting down with the MPD precinct commander to coordinate response protocols. Who calls whom. What radio channel to use. Where the staging area is if things go wrong.
“It’s not rocket science,” said one supervisor. “But you’d be amazed how many companies skip all three of those steps.”
After the weekend
Memphis got through Labor Day 2019 without a major security incident at any of the large events. There were the usual bar fights on Beale, a few arrests at the Classic, and one stabbing at a house party in Frayser that had nothing to do with organized events.
That’s not the same as saying everything went smoothly. Several venue managers I spoke with after the weekend said they were unhappy with the guards they received. Complaints ranged from guards showing up late to guards spending more time on their phones than watching the crowd.
“I paid for professionals and got warm bodies,” said the manager of a Midtown restaurant that hired extra security for a rooftop party. “Next year I’m starting the search in June.”
That’s probably smart advice for any Memphis business planning around holiday weekends. The companies that do this well book up fast. The ones left scrambling to fill posts at the last minute are the ones most likely to cut the corners that create real risk.
Labor Day is over. Halloween, Thanksgiving weekend, and New Year’s Eve are all coming. Memphis doesn’t get quieter. It just changes which streets need the guards.