We asked a member who runs cheese retail out of a specialty shop how her holiday planning was going this year, and she laughed before she answered. Two weeks ago she had a full counter staff scheduled through New Year's. This week she has two people out sick and a third waiting on a test result, and December is normally the month that makes or breaks her year.
She's not alone. Reporting this month put the number of positions employers are trying to fill nationally at close to a million, with major retailers, transportation firms, and warehouses alone announcing nearly 940,000 seasonal hiring pushes this year — an 11% jump over last December, when the shortage was already bad. Cheese counters have it worse than most retail on that front, because the job isn't easily backfilled. Cutting a wheel cleanly, building a gift box that doesn't fall apart in transit, answering a question about a washed-rind cheese — none of that is something you can hand a day-one seasonal hire and walk away from.
What she's cutting to make it work
Her answer wasn't heroic, and she was clear she didn't want it to sound that way. She simplified the gift-box menu from twelve combinations down to four, so anyone on the floor can build one correctly without checking a binder first. She moved her cheese-and-wine pairing tasting, normally a big December draw, online rather than canceling it outright — a staff member records a short video instead of standing behind a table handing out samples, and customers seem fine with the trade. And she's asked her longest-tenured counter staff to take on fewer of the fun tasks, like curating new arrivals for the case, and more of the repetitive ones, so newer or borrowed staff can be pointed at simpler jobs without much training.
None of this is what she'd choose in a normal year. But she also told us the version of this problem she had in December 2020 was worse, in one specific way: back then, she had no playbook at all, just improvisation done in real time. This year she at least has a shorter menu, a video camera, and a rough sense of which parts of a busy weekend can bend without breaking. That's not much, but it's the difference between a bad week and a week she can actually get through.
What we're hearing more broadly
Her experience lines up with what national retail hiring data has been showing all fall: fewer seasonal workers applying, staff calling out on short notice, and a general labor shortage that hits small, specialized shops harder than big-box stores with larger applicant pools to draw from. If your shop is dealing with the same thing, you're not managing this badly — you're managing it in a month when almost nobody in retail has slack to spare.
If you want to compare notes with other retail members on what's actually working this month, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been fielding informal check-ins by phone rather than waiting for its next scheduled meeting. Reach out to your regional contact if you'd like to be looped in before the rush is over and the lessons are harder to remember.
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.