The Cheese Shop in Colonial Williamsburg has stopped making sandwiches because of worker shortage – The Washington Post

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Mike Lucotch and his family have traveled to Colonial Williamsburg from their home in western Pennsylvania once or twice a year since the 1980s. This week they checked off most of the usual boxes. Dinner in a tavern. Shopping along the restored Duke of Gloucester Street. Admiring the traditional pineapple-and-evergreen holiday decorations.But come lunchtime Friday, they were in for an unwelcome surprise. Lucotch and his son ducked into the Cheese Shop to pick up sandwiches, as always, and found that there were none. The iconic market and eatery, run by the same family for a half-century, has decided to suspend sandwich-making at the busiest time of year because there aren’t enough workers to keep up with demand.Businesses all over the country are struggling with worker shortages as the economy continues its strange rebound from the calamity of the coronavirus pandemic. Retailers have been especially hard hit; low-wage workers used the pandemic pause — as well as increased support from the government — to reevaluate priorities and seek new opportunities.“We’ve gotten busier and busier over the last four months, but we haven’t been able to hire,” said Cathy Power Pattisall, one of three siblings who run the business their parents founded in 1971. “Employees leave but revenue and volume have gone up. It’s a combination that’s just meant to crash and burn at some point.”The staffing problem has caught them off guard. The shop shut down for about two months last year at the height of the pandemic, but most employees returned once things began to open back up. The Cheese Shop, after all, has been an anchor of the local business community for generations — originally in Newport News, then opening in Williamsburg in 1973.The Cheese Shop was the first eatery in Williamsburg to offer upscale meats and cheeses at a time when local options were pretty much limited to ye olde tavern fare and endless pancake houses. Uncountable numbers of William & Mary students worked their way through college there, not to mention augmented their diet with $1 bags of “ends,” or bread trimmings left over from sandwich-making.The family said they’ve almost always paid above minimum wage, offering from $12 to $35 an hour depending on experience and hours per week. But the William & Mary employee pipeline seems to have dried up. Today the only college students who sometimes work there are Pattisall’s children (who attend the University of Virginia). As the shop’s workers have left for various reasons over the past year, no one has stepped up to replace them.The continued threat of the pandemic clearly doesn’t help. Not long ago, they heard from a young woman who had moved to Virginia from another state, where she had worked at a Whole Foods. “She was absolutely the perfect fit for us,” Rogers said. “But she ultimately just decided she wasn’t comfortable working until the pandemic was over.”After resorting to making unsolicited offers to customers — “Anyone who compliments our business, I ask them if they want to work for us,” Pattisall said — the family decided something had to give. They stopped selling gift boxes because no one had time to pack them. And this week they pulled the plug on sandwiches.Demand was so high they had to abandon plans to sell sandwiches through Friday, offering disappointed customers the chance to buy packs of meat and cheese as sandwich kits. Ahmed Hassan, 58, a local architect, had shown up with orders for everyone back at the office. He had to settle for a bag full of kits.