A Target employee in Cordova walks out the front door carrying a 55-inch television, crosses 40 feet of open parking lot, and loads it into a customer’s SUV. She does this six or seven times per shift. No escort. No camera coverage on the pickup lane. No security presence between the door and the car.
She told me last week she doesn’t think about it much anymore. “You just get used to it,” she said. “Even when it’s dark at 5:30.”
That sentence should bother every retailer in Memphis. Because what she’s describing isn’t just a routine task. It’s a pattern, and criminals in this city have had nine months to study it.
The Curbside Explosion
Curbside pickup went from a convenience feature to a survival strategy almost overnight when COVID hit in March. Retailers who had never offered it scrambled to set up systems. By summer, it was standard. By this holiday season, it’s the primary way millions of Americans are shopping.
National data from the International Council of Shopping Centers shows curbside pickup volume grew over 200% in 2020 compared to the prior year. Adobe Analytics reported that “buy online, pick up in store” orders jumped 52% during the first week of the holiday shopping season compared to 2019.
In Memphis, the shift is visible at every major retail corridor. Drive down Germantown Parkway any Saturday afternoon and count the orange cones marking curbside zones at Best Buy, Kohl’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and a half-dozen other stores. The Poplar and Highland intersection, anchored by Whole Foods and the shops around it, has curbside traffic that backs up onto the street during peak hours. Down in Southaven, the Tanger Outlets and the retail strip along Goodman Road have turned entire parking rows into pickup lanes.
The volume is staggering. And the security implications are only starting to register.
Where the Risk Lives
Traditional retail security was designed around a simple concept: protect the merchandise inside the store. Cameras face the aisles. Loss prevention officers watch the exits. Alarm tags sit on high-value items. The entire system assumes that the point of greatest vulnerability is the moment a shoplifter tries to walk out the front door.
Curbside pickup breaks that model completely.
The merchandise leaves the store in the hands of an employee. It crosses an open, often poorly lit parking lot. It gets handed to someone sitting in a car, and the only verification in many cases is a name and an order number displayed on a phone screen. The whole exchange takes 90 seconds. There’s no alarm tag. There’s no receipt check. In most setups, there’s not even a camera pointed at the pickup zone.
This creates three distinct problems that loss prevention teams are scrambling to address.
Employees as targets. A 19-year-old carrying $800 worth of electronics across a parking lot at 7 p.m. on a December evening is vulnerable. Period. Grab-and-run incidents, where someone snatches the merchandise out of an employee’s hands, have been reported at retail locations across the Mid-South this fall. Most don’t make the news. Most don’t even generate a police report, because the employee is unharmed and the store eats the loss.
Customers as targets. People sitting in parked cars, often looking down at their phones waiting for a pickup notification, are easy marks for smash-and-grab auto burglaries. The curbside zones at busy stores create a collection of stationary vehicles with distracted occupants, sometimes for 15 to 20 minutes at a time. That’s an invitation.
Predictable patterns. Curbside zones are marked. They’re in the same spot every day. Employees come out the same door on roughly the same schedule. The flow is completely predictable, and predictability is the enemy of security. Any loss prevention professional will tell you that randomization is one of the best deterrents available. Curbside pickup is the opposite of random.
The Theft Problem Nobody’s Tracking Well
Retail shrinkage was already a $61.7 billion problem nationally before COVID, according to the National Retail Federation’s 2020 security survey. This year, with pandemic-related staffing shortages and economic stress piled on, industry analysts expect losses to climb past $70 billion.
The tricky part is that curbside pickup theft doesn’t always show up in the usual shrinkage categories. When someone intercepts a curbside order by giving a fake name and order number, that loss might get classified as a fulfillment error rather than theft. When an employee drops an order at the wrong vehicle and the actual customer reports it missing, the store might process it as a re-shipment, not a stolen item.
I talked to a loss prevention manager at a major retailer on Germantown Parkway (who asked me not to name the store or use his name) in early December. He told me that curbside-related losses at his location had tripled since the spring, and he suspected the real number was higher because of how his company’s reporting system categorized the incidents.
“We’re catching maybe half of it,” he said. “The rest just looks like a process problem in the data.”
He described a scheme his team had identified in October: someone would place a legitimate online order, then send a second person to pick it up before the actual customer arrived. The second person would give the order number, grab the bag, and leave. When the real customer showed up, the store would fulfill the order again. The original thief now had free merchandise, and the loss got buried in duplicate-order reports.
“It’s not sophisticated,” he said. “It’s just exploiting a system that was built for speed, not security.”
What Memphis Retailers Are Doing About It
The responses vary wildly. Some are doing almost nothing. Others are investing.
A few stores on Germantown Parkway have repositioned existing security cameras to cover their curbside pickup lanes. That’s a start, though cameras are a deterrent and an evidence tool, not a prevention measure.
At least two retailers in the Southaven corridor have added a dedicated security guard to their curbside zones during peak hours, typically 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. The guard doesn’t check orders or handle merchandise. The guard’s job is presence: standing in the pickup area in a visible uniform, making eye contact, being seen. It’s the oldest security principle there is, and it works.
Some stores have moved their curbside zones closer to the building entrance, reducing the distance employees have to walk in open space. Others have added lighting to pickup areas that were designed for parking, not commerce.
The more creative approaches involve verification. A handful of retailers now require customers to show a photo ID matching the order name before merchandise gets loaded. It adds 30 seconds to the transaction and creates occasional friction, but it closes the fake-name loophole almost entirely.
Private security companies in the Memphis market have started pitching “curbside security packages” to retailers: a uniformed guard during peak hours, a marked patrol vehicle in the lot, and incident reporting that gives the store’s loss prevention team data they wouldn’t otherwise have. The cost runs $25 to $40 an hour depending on whether the guard is armed, and several companies report strong interest from retail clients heading into January.
The Employee Safety Gap
Lost merchandise is a financial problem. An employee getting hurt in a parking lot is something else entirely.
Tennessee’s workers’ compensation laws require employers to cover injuries sustained on the job, and an employee assaulted while carrying a curbside order to a customer’s car is clearly within that scope. The liability exposure for retailers who haven’t taken basic steps to secure their pickup operations is significant.
I asked three Memphis-area employment attorneys whether they’d seen claims related to curbside pickup incidents. Two said they hadn’t yet. The third said she’d gotten “preliminary inquiries” from employees at two separate retailers who had been grabbed or shoved during curbside handoffs this fall.
“It’s coming,” she said. “The first time someone gets seriously hurt carrying a TV to a car at 8 p.m. in an unlit parking lot, the question will be what did the employer do to prevent it. If the answer is nothing, that’s a problem.”
Most retailers have written policies about employee safety in parking areas. Whether those policies have been updated to reflect the reality of curbside pickup, where employees are outside multiple times per hour rather than occasionally, is another question. Based on what I’ve seen at stores across Memphis this month, many have not.
What Comes Next
Curbside pickup isn’t going away. Even when the pandemic eventually loosens its grip, consumer behavior has shifted. People like not going inside stores. The convenience factor is enormous, and retailers who try to scale it back will lose customers to competitors who don’t.
That means the security gaps exposed in 2020 will need real solutions, not temporary workarounds. Lighting, cameras, guard presence, verification protocols, employee training: these aren’t optional upgrades. They’re the minimum for any retailer running a serious curbside operation.
The holiday season will stress-test every system in place right now. Memphis retailers are processing more curbside orders per day than they did per week in February. The volume isn’t going down.
Somewhere in a parking lot on Germantown Parkway tonight, a 20-year-old making $11 an hour will walk a gaming console out to a dark corner of the lot and hand it through a car window. She’ll do it because that’s her job and because nobody has told her not to. The system was designed for speed.
Security was an afterthought. In Memphis, in December 2020, afterthoughts have a way of becoming front-page stories.