“Après le Deluge”

Cheese Talk with

Juliet Harbutt

• How one cheese shop supported locals in lockdown
• Rory Mellis, IJ Mellis: “Local businesses have a chance to flourish”
• Why we should be proud of the cheese industry’s response to Covid
• The joy of cheese grading
• “Keeping the faith”

The madness of Christmas drags even the least motivated of your staff along in its wake and inspires even the grumpiest customers to part with more money than usual

But how do you maintain their enthusiasm and morale in the aftermath when customers and money are in short supply and the January/February doldrums start to take hold?

It took a decade of retailing to realise this is not a dead time but a genuine opportunity to revitalise the shop, my staff, myself and my customers by using the time to clean up, catch up, design new systems, train and develop your staff and spend time getting to know your regulars – and finally give yourself time off.

Ideally kick it off in December by offering incentives and rewards during the Christmas period. As well as incentives for sales run an awards programme. Get the staff to create and nominated each other weekly from December 1st to January 1st for a combination of serious and fun awards like Best Person to Work With, Saint of the Week (or Most Patient Person), Person with Best Sales Pitch etc. As long as they are measurable, voted for by the staff and each award has a prize it will work.

One of my favourites was Best Customer Comment Overheard by Staff – a French customer said “I used to have to bring cheeses back from my France every summer for my English friends. Now I just order them from Jeroboams who get them from various artisan cheesemakers near my village, pick them up the day after I get back and pretend I lugged them all the way home just for them. Perfect!”

The prize can be the classics – wine, cash, time off, theatre tickets etc – but combine them with days off to visit suppliers and producers some will happily organise tastings and demonstrations, trade shows (such as IFE, running from 22th-25th March in London), Borough Market or your local farmers markets, and of course your competitors. Maybe divide them into teams and let them try out new layouts and move things around – all of which should be part of your training programme – then perhaps you could ask customers to vote for the best or get them to nominate their favourite. 

Meanwhile you can redo your very tatty POS labels. Choose the ideal size labels you want under ‘Mailing’ in Word for each area of the shop – Cheese, Shelf Items, Confectionery etc. You can add new products whenever you want and just copy and paste the ones you want to print out into page one. They are best laminated. Irritatingly I cannot find any printer that will print white on black which is my favourite colour scheme, but black on white works almost as well. 

Last but not least, have a night out with staff and friends and come up with a month-by-month list of tweets for all occasions. You don’t have to use them all, but it is better than trying to think of them when the pipes are frozen or the Easter eggs have arrived! 

The road to hell is paved, etcetera, so book your time off now.