The manager of a Family Dollar store on Jackson Avenue told me something last week that stuck with me. She said she doesn’t bother calling police anymore when someone walks out with merchandise. The response time is too long, the stolen amount is too small, and the officers who do show up can’t do much anyway.
“They took $80 worth of laundry detergent on Tuesday,” she said. “Nobody’s going to jail over Tide.”
She’s not wrong. And her store isn’t an outlier. Retail theft in Memphis has been climbing steadily, and it’s going to get worse as fall approaches. The back-to-school rush, the lead-up to Halloween, and the early holiday shopping season create a three-month window where theft spikes at stores across Shelby County.
The Numbers
Memphis Police Department doesn’t break out shoplifting statistics the way some departments do, which makes hard numbers elusive. What we do know comes from a combination of MPD aggregate data, FBI Uniform Crime Report figures, and conversations with store managers and loss prevention professionals.
Tennessee’s larceny rate has been above the national average for years. Memphis is well above the state average. In 2018, MPD recorded over 18,000 larceny-theft reports, a category that includes shoplifting alongside other forms of theft. The actual number of shoplifting incidents is almost certainly much higher, because many retailers don’t bother reporting thefts under a certain dollar threshold.
The National Retail Federation’s 2019 survey found that the average American retailer loses about 1.38% of sales to “shrink,” an umbrella term covering shoplifting, employee theft, administrative errors, and vendor fraud. For a Memphis store doing $2 million in annual revenue, that’s roughly $27,600 walking out the door. Shoplifting typically accounts for about a third of total shrink, though the proportion varies by store type and location.
Dollar stores get hit hardest in Memphis. Family Dollar and Dollar General locations in North Memphis, Frayser, and South Memphis report theft levels that store managers call constant. The product mix at these stores, small, easy-to-resell items like detergent, health and beauty products, and phone accessories, makes them easy targets.
Grocery stores are close behind. Kroger operates more than 30 locations in the greater Memphis area, and several store managers told me (off the record, because Kroger’s corporate communications team doesn’t love unauthorized press commentary) that theft has increased noticeably over the past 18 months. Meat, baby formula, and alcohol are the most commonly stolen items. All three have high resale value.
Organized Retail Crime
There’s a difference between a teenager pocketing a candy bar and a crew of adults hitting three stores in an hour with booster bags and a getaway car. Memphis has both, and the organized version is growing.
Organized retail crime, or ORC, involves groups that steal merchandise systematically and resell it for profit. The operation typically works like this: a crew targets specific high-value items, hits multiple stores in a short window, and delivers the stolen goods to a fence who sells them online or at flea markets. Some ORC rings are sophisticated enough to have designated drivers, lookouts, and even fake return receipt operations.
The Memphis Police Department’s Organized Crime Unit has investigated several ORC rings in the past year. One case involved a group that was hitting Walgreens and CVS stores across East Memphis and Midtown, focusing on over-the-counter medications and cosmetics. The goods were turning up at a flea market in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line.
Wolfchase Galleria, the largest mall in Memphis, has dealt with organized theft rings targeting anchor stores and specialty retailers. Mall security works with MPD on these cases, but the sheer volume of foot traffic makes surveillance difficult. Wolfchase draws 15,000 people on a Saturday afternoon. Picking out a professional shoplifter in that crowd is a needle-in-a-haystack exercise.
Oak Court Mall in East Memphis and Carrefour at Kirby have similar problems on a smaller scale. Both properties have invested in upgraded camera systems and increased security guard hours over the past year.
The Fall Spike
Why does theft increase in the fall? A few reasons.
Back-to-school shopping creates higher traffic volume in stores. More people in the aisles means more cover for shoplifters and more strain on loss prevention staff. A LP officer watching a video feed of 200 customers can’t track all of them.
The product mix shifts. Fall merchandise like jackets, backpacks, and electronics for students tends to be higher-ticket than summer inventory. A stolen winter coat moves faster than a stolen pair of flip-flops.
Holiday preparation starts earlier every year. Retailers begin stocking seasonal merchandise in September and October. Gift-friendly items like electronics, fragrances, and small appliances are prime targets for ORC crews building inventory for resale.
Memphis also has its own seasonal factor. The Memphis In May festival season wraps up, Beale Street settles into its summer rhythm, and the city’s attention shifts to football and fall festivals. There’s less police and public attention on retail corridors during this period.
Loss Prevention Strategies
Memphis retailers are fighting back with a mix of technology, staffing, and process changes. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t.
Electronic article surveillance, the anti-theft tags that trigger an alarm at the door, is standard at most clothing and electronics retailers. The problem is that experienced shoplifters know how to defeat these systems. Booster bags lined with foil block the signal. Strong magnets pop hard tags off. Some thieves simply walk through the alarm and keep going, counting on the fact that nobody will chase them.
Tennessee law allows retailers to detain suspected shoplifters under the state’s shopkeeper’s privilege statute, but most corporate chains have strict no-chase policies. An employee at a Memphis Target told me they’re instructed to observe and report, never to physically intervene. The liability risk of a tackle gone wrong outweighs the cost of the stolen goods.
Camera systems have improved. Many Memphis stores now use high-definition cameras with facial recognition capability, though whether they’re actually running facial recognition software is another question. The technology exists. The legal and ethical framework around using it on retail customers is still evolving.
Lock cases are the low-tech solution that’s spread across Memphis like kudzu. Walk into a Walgreens in Midtown and you’ll find razors, deodorant, and laundry pods locked behind plexiglass panels. Customers need to find an employee with a key to buy a $4 bottle of shampoo. It reduces theft. It also reduces sales, because some customers don’t want to wait three minutes for someone to unlock a case. Stores lose an estimated 15% to 25% of sales on locked items due to customer walkaway.
Private Security in Retail
More Memphis retailers are turning to private security firms for in-store loss prevention support. This is distinct from the uniformed guard standing at the entrance. Retail-focused security involves plainclothes loss prevention officers who blend in with shoppers and watch for theft in real time.
Allied Universal and Securitas both offer retail LP programs with national chain contracts in Memphis. A dedicated LP officer costs $20 to $30 per hour depending on whether they’re armed and what training they carry.
Smaller firms compete on price and local knowledge. A Memphis-based security company might charge $15 to $18 per hour for an unarmed LP officer. They know which stores get hit hardest, they know the faces of repeat offenders, and they can coordinate with local precinct officers in a way that national firms sometimes struggle with.
Some retailers are experimenting with off-duty MPD officers for high-theft locations. An off-duty officer in uniform carries more deterrent value than a private guard and has full arrest powers. The tradeoff is cost. Off-duty MPD officers working retail security pull $35 to $50 per hour, putting them out of reach for most small retailers.
The Resale Market
Stolen merchandise doesn’t evaporate. It gets sold. Memphis has well-established channels for moving stolen retail goods.
Flea markets across Shelby County and DeSoto County, Mississippi sell merchandise that almost certainly includes stolen items. The sellers are rarely the people who did the stealing. Middlemen buy stolen goods at 20 to 30 cents on the dollar and resell them at outdoor markets and informal pop-up shops.
Online marketplaces have made resale even easier. Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, and Craigslist all see listings for new-in-box consumer goods at suspiciously low prices. A sealed box of Gillette razor cartridges at half price on Facebook probably didn’t come from any wholesaler.
Memphis police have conducted sting operations targeting fences and online resellers, with mixed results. The operations eat manpower and don’t produce the kind of high-profile arrests that justify the resources. A fence moving $5,000 worth of stolen detergent won’t ever rank alongside a gun trafficking case.
What Retailers Can Do
There’s no magic fix for retail theft in Memphis. But the stores that manage it best tend to share a few practices.
They train employees to recognize theft patterns. Not to intervene physically, but to greet every customer, maintain eye contact, and signal awareness. The simple act of saying “Can I help you find something?” to a potential shoplifter changes the calculus. Anonymity is the thief’s best friend.
They invest in camera systems and actually monitor them. A camera that records but never gets watched is just expensive decoration. Stores with active monitoring, whether in-house LP staff or a remote service, catch more theft and recover more merchandise.
They coordinate with neighboring businesses. A shoplifter who gets stopped at one store on Poplar Avenue will often walk down the block and try another. Retailers that share information about active theft patterns through informal networks or formal retail crime partnerships catch repeat offenders faster.
They report everything. Even the small stuff. Even when they know MPD won’t send a car. The reports create a data trail that helps police identify patterns, and they help retailers make insurance claims.
And they accept that some level of theft is a cost of doing business in a city where property crime rates are high and enforcement resources are stretched thin. The goal isn’t zero theft. It’s manageable theft. In Memphis right now, a lot of retailers aren’t there yet.
Fall is coming. The merchandise is hitting the shelves. And somewhere in Shelby County, somebody is already planning which stores to hit first.