Every cheese shop has a version of this ritual, and most of them happen the same week: the doors close for a day or two around the holiday, and before anyone can relax, someone counts what's left. Not for the register — for the order that has to go out the moment the shop reopens, because a case that looks generous on the 24th can look thin fast if the count is wrong.
This year one of our retail members did that count with a storm warning open on her phone. She runs the cheese program at a small shop, part of a chain small enough that she still does her own ordering, and she'd spent the fall watching a market that behaved unlike any she'd seen in her nine years in the job — record milk prices, tight supply on a few of her most popular imports, and a customer base buying more than usual anyway. "People wanted to splurge this year," she told us. "Even with everything costing more, the cheese course was where they wanted to spend it."
Counting in a record year
That's a good problem until it isn't. A stronger December means the gap between "what's in the case" and "what's already spoken for" closes faster than usual, and this member said she'd underordered twice already this month, once on a triple-crème that sold out by the 10th and once on a blue that a regular had been asking about since Thanksgiving. Her count this week wasn't just inventory — it was an attempt to guess, one more time, how much appetite was still out there before the holiday actually arrived.
The storm made the guessing worse. A shipment she was counting on arriving by the 22nd was rerouted twice by the blizzard crossing the middle of the country, and by the time she did her count yesterday she genuinely didn't know if it would land before the shop closed today. "You count what's in front of you and you order for both outcomes," she said, which is a fairly good description of how a lot of small cheese businesses have run this entire year — pricing, hiring, and ordering all done a little bit in the dark, because the market itself has been unusually hard to read even by the standards of an industry that's always guessing at demand six weeks out.
What we took from the conversation
Nothing about this story is dramatic. Nobody lost a shipment entirely, and by the time we talked to her the truck had made it through, a day later than planned. But it's a useful snapshot of what a genuinely strong year looks like from inside a small shop, rather than from the trade press: not smooth, just busy in a way that leaves less room for error than a slower year would.
If your own year-end count is turning up gaps the same way, you're not the only one, and it's worth a conversation with your distributor now about what a tighter reorder window might look like heading into next year rather than waiting until you're caught short again. And if the count itself — knowing what's actually moving versus what just feels like it is — is the part you'd like to get better at, that's exactly what our retail case-management coursework is built for.
However your shop is closing out the week, we hope the count comes out close to right, and that whatever's still in transit gets there before the toast.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.