A Walgreens on Union Avenue in Memphis closed its doors for good in March. The company cited “business conditions,” the same vague language retailers use when they don’t want to say the real reason out loud. Employees at neighboring businesses told a different story: the store had been hit by organized shoplifting crews so frequently that the loss numbers made it impossible to keep operating.
That Walgreens is one of dozens of retail closures across Tennessee in the past two years where organized retail crime played a role in the decision. ORC, as the industry calls it, isn’t the petty shoplifting most people picture. It’s coordinated, professional, and enormously profitable for the criminal networks behind it. Tennessee’s response in 2025 has been to build specialized task forces that pair law enforcement with retail loss prevention teams. Whether that response is fast enough to reverse the damage is the question keeping Tennessee retailers awake.
How Organized Theft Rings Actually Work
The mechanics of ORC are straightforward once you understand the supply chain. It operates like any distribution business, just with stolen merchandise instead of legitimately sourced goods.
At the bottom are the boosters. These are the people walking into stores and filling bags with specific items. They aren’t grabbing random products. They’re working from lists provided by the people above them in the organization. The target items are almost always high-value, easily resellable products: laundry detergent, baby formula, over-the-counter medications, cosmetics, razor blades, and electronics accessories. A single booster can steal $500 to $2,000 worth of merchandise in a single visit to a store, and professional boosters hit multiple stores per day.
The boosters sell their hauls to fencing operations, which are the middle layer of the supply chain. Fences aggregate stolen goods from multiple boosters, remove or alter security tags and packaging, and resell the merchandise through several channels. Some operate physical storefronts, often small convenience stores or discount shops that mix stolen goods in with legitimately purchased inventory. Others sell exclusively online through Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other platforms where buyers can’t easily distinguish stolen merchandise from legitimate product.
At the top sit the organizers. They recruit boosters, manage fencing operations, handle logistics, and launder the proceeds. TBI investigators have described some Tennessee ORC operations as generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue. A few of the larger networks that have been disrupted in the past two years were pulling in over a million dollars annually from stolen retail goods.
The Memphis ORC Unit
Memphis established a dedicated ORC unit within MPD in late 2024, staffing it with detectives from the property crimes division and partnering with TBI’s retail crime investigators. The unit works directly with loss prevention teams from major retailers operating in the Memphis market.
The model is collaborative in a way that traditional policing isn’t. Retail loss prevention managers share surveillance footage, transaction data, and suspect information with the ORC unit through a secure portal. When a booster shows up at a Target in Cordova and then appears three hours later at a Walmart in Southaven, the loss prevention teams at both stores can flag the connection and push it to MPD within hours rather than weeks.
Through mid-2025, the Memphis ORC unit has been involved in roughly a dozen significant cases resulting in arrests. The biggest so far involved a fencing operation running out of a storage unit facility on Summer Avenue. Detectives recovered approximately $340,000 in stolen merchandise, mostly health and beauty products still in original packaging. Three people were charged with organized retail crime under Tennessee’s statute, which carries felony penalties when the value of stolen goods exceeds $1,000 in a 90-day period.
The unit’s effectiveness depends heavily on cooperation from retailers, and that cooperation varies. Large national chains with sophisticated loss prevention departments provide excellent data. Smaller retailers with minimal security infrastructure often don’t report ORC incidents at all, either because they don’t recognize the pattern or because they’ve given up on law enforcement response to theft.
Tennessee’s ORC Legislation
Tennessee updated its organized retail crime statutes in 2024, creating enhanced penalties and giving prosecutors additional tools to pursue ORC cases.
The key change was treating organized retail theft as a distinct crime category rather than aggregating individual shoplifting charges. Under the previous framework, a booster caught with $300 in stolen merchandise from one store faced a misdemeanor. Under the new law, prosecutors can aggregate thefts across multiple stores and multiple dates to reach the felony threshold of $1,000. They can also charge organizers and fences with conspiracy to commit organized retail crime, which carries penalties of two to twelve years depending on the total value of merchandise involved.
The legislation also created a mechanism for retailers to share loss data with law enforcement through TBI without running afoul of competitive confidentiality concerns. Retailers who previously wouldn’t disclose their shrinkage numbers to a task force that included representatives from competing chains can now submit data to TBI under a confidential reporting framework.
Critics of the legislation argue that enhanced penalties alone won’t solve the problem. Public defenders in Memphis and Nashville have pointed out that the boosters most likely to be arrested and charged are often people dealing with addiction or economic desperation, and longer sentences for them don’t address the sophisticated organizers at the top of the chain. It’s a valid critique. The arrest data from Memphis’s ORC unit confirms the pattern: the majority of people charged so far are boosters, not organizers.
What Retailers Are Doing on Their Own
Tennessee retailers aren’t waiting for law enforcement task forces to solve their ORC problems. Many have increased their private security presence significantly in 2025.
Kroger, which operates over 100 stores in Tennessee, has expanded its use of uniformed security guards at high-shrinkage locations. Several Memphis-area Kroger stores now have armed security during peak hours. The company has also invested in self-checkout monitoring technology that flags unusual transaction patterns.
Dollar General, which has more Tennessee locations than almost any other retailer, took a different approach. The company invested in camera systems and merchandise lockup displays rather than guards. This makes sense for a low-margin, high-volume retailer where the cost of a full-time guard at every store would be prohibitive. The trade-off is that locked merchandise creates a worse customer experience and slows transactions.
Home Depot and Lowe’s have both increased their loss prevention staffing in Tennessee and installed more aggressive anti-theft devices on high-value tools and equipment. Both chains report that power tools and copper wire are among their most stolen items in the Memphis market, consistent with national ORC trends in the home improvement category.
Private security companies working retail contracts in Tennessee describe a market that’s changed considerably in the past three years. Retail clients used to view guard services as a variable cost they could cut during slow periods. Now many treat security as a fixed operational expense, on par with utilities or insurance. The shift reflects both the severity of the ORC problem and the insurance mandates that are increasingly requiring security measures as a condition of coverage.
The Store Closure Problem
When a retailer decides the theft at a location is too severe to sustain, the store closes. The impact radiates outward. Employees lose jobs. Customers lose access to goods and services. Property owners lose anchor tenants. The remaining stores in the area absorb more of the ORC pressure as boosters shift their activity.
Memphis has felt this acutely. Several neighborhoods that were already underserved by retail have lost stores in the past two years, with ORC cited as a contributing factor. The Whitehaven area lost two pharmacy locations in 2024. Parts of Frayser have seen convenience store closures. Each closure makes the remaining stores in those areas more attractive targets for organized theft crews, creating a cycle that’s difficult to break.
Nashville has experienced the same dynamic in North Nashville and parts of East Nashville, though the scale is smaller than what Memphis has seen. Chattanooga has been less affected, partly because its retail market is smaller and partly because the Chattanooga Police Department integrated loss prevention partnerships into its policing model earlier than Memphis did.
The national dimension matters too. When retailers make corporate decisions about which stores to close, they look at profitability rankings across their entire portfolio. A Memphis store competing for survival against stores in cities with less ORC activity is at a structural disadvantage. The theft problem is local. The corporate decision-making is national.
How Private Security Fits In
Private security companies play a specific role in the ORC response chain that’s distinct from what law enforcement does.
Guards at retail locations serve primarily as deterrence and observation. A uniformed officer standing near the entrance changes the risk calculus for boosters, who prefer easy targets over ones where they might be identified or confronted. Guards who are trained to observe and report, documenting suspect descriptions, vehicle information, and merchandise targeted, provide the raw intelligence that feeds into ORC task force investigations.
The line between observation and intervention is where things get complicated. Tennessee law allows security guards to detain suspected shoplifters under the shopkeeper’s privilege statute, which permits reasonable detention for a reasonable period to investigate suspected theft. In practice, most security companies instruct their retail guards not to physically detain anyone because the liability exposure from a wrongful detention or a physical alteration during detention far exceeds the value of the stolen merchandise.
This creates frustration on both sides. Retailers want guards who will stop theft from walking out the door. Security companies want to avoid the lawsuit that comes when a guard tackles a suspect who turns out to be innocent, or when a detention goes wrong and someone gets hurt. The compromise that most Tennessee security operators have settled on is what the industry calls “aggressive hospitality,” guards who make eye contact with potential boosters, offer assistance, and make it clear that the person is being watched, without physically intervening if they decide to leave with merchandise.
Where This Goes From Here
Tennessee’s ORC task forces are still new. The Memphis unit has been operating for less than a year. Nashville launched a similar effort in mid-2025, partnering with Metro PD and the state’s retail crime association. Knoxville is reportedly planning its own unit for early next year.
The early results are promising in terms of arrests and recovered merchandise. The harder metric to measure is whether the task forces are actually reducing the total volume of organized retail theft in Tennessee or simply displacing it. If a crackdown in Memphis pushes ORC networks to shift their operations to Jackson, Clarksville, or rural areas with less law enforcement attention, the statewide numbers might not improve even if Memphis sees progress.
What’s clear is that the old approach of treating retail theft as a low-priority property crime has failed. ORC is organized crime. The networks running these operations in Tennessee are professional, adaptable, and profitable. The response needs to match that level of sophistication, which means sustained funding for task forces, continued partnership between law enforcement and retailers, and honest accounting of whether the strategy is actually working.
The Walgreens on Union Avenue isn’t reopening. The question is whether the stores that remain open in neighborhoods across Tennessee will still be there in two years. The answer depends on whether the task force model proves more than a press conference.