Several of our retail members opened January short-handed, and it isn't a coincidence. A winter wave of illness is keeping grocery and specialty retail workers home across the country at a rate that's thinning shelves even at large chains, and small specialty counters — where two or three people often run the entire cheese program — feel a single absence far more sharply than a supermarket with a deep bench does.
The coverage gap we're hearing about isn't the delivery-truck story we wrote about a few weeks ago, though severe winter weather is compounding that too. This is specifically about who's behind the counter on a given afternoon. A cheesemonger calling out sick doesn't just mean fewer hands cutting wheels — it means whoever's left is also fielding customer questions, restocking, and running the register, all without the product knowledge that took the absent staffer years to build. A few members told us they've started closing an hour early on short-staffed days rather than run the counter thin and risk a bad customer experience or an unsafe rush at the slicer.
What members are trying
There's no single fix here, but a few approaches have come up more than once in conversations this week:
- Cross-training a second person on basic cheese handling and labeling, even if they're not your primary monger, so a single absence doesn't shut down the whole case.
- Trimming the number of active cheeses on the counter temporarily rather than trying to run a full program with a skeleton crew — a tighter, well-tended selection beats a sprawling one nobody has time to check.
- Being upfront with regular customers about reduced hours or a smaller case. Members report that regulars are largely understanding right now, more so than they expected going into the new year.
None of this is a substitute for actual staffing, and we're not going to pretend a rotation trick solves a labor shortage. But if you're triaging this week, prioritize whatever keeps your food-safety basics intact — proper glove changes, correct case temperatures, clean slicers — over keeping every variety on display. A short case is a minor inconvenience. A food-safety lapse from a rushed, undertrained fill-in is not.
The part that's easy to miss
It's worth saying plainly: this kind of short-term staffing strain is exactly when small mistakes compound. If you're pulling in a stockroom employee to help behind the counter for the first time, don't assume they already know your allergen labeling or your cross-contact rules just because they've worked in the store for years. A five-minute refresher before their first shift on the counter is cheap insurance, and it's a habit worth keeping even once staffing normalizes.
If your team could use a fast, practical refresher, the Education Committee can point new or temporary counter staff toward shorter modules rather than a full course — ask on the member portal. And if you're managing through this right now, we'd genuinely like to hear what's working; member stories like these are often the most useful thing we publish, especially when the fix turns out to be simpler than expected.
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.