How did I get into cheese?  The short answer is earlier in this blog.  This part three of the longer answer, and takes place in 1984 at Bloomingdales.



My colleagues and I were keenly aware that change was afoot in American cheesemaking but it was too early to understand the totality of what was happening. The few knowledgeable veterans at the counter could readily mock the concept that great American cheese was news. Cabot, Crowley, and Shelburne Farms in Vermont had been making cheddar that was our gold standard for decades. The Maytag people, yes relations to the home appliance folks, had been making an excellent blue for nearly a century. These newcomers like the Goat Folks and Coach Farms (we had yet to learn of the bustling cheesemaking scene on the west coast), were interesting but hardly a movement.

Although I enjoyed working with the cured meats and prepared foods, cheese always took the majority of my attention. For one, its share was usually about half the overall display, and for another it was where your authority mattered. Then as now, people’s enthusiasm for cheese nearly tripled their actual knowledge of it. This gave me my chance to be Tony or Marc, that Café La Semeuse guyfrom part two of this serial.

 Authority, a command of a subject and an ability to communicate that knowledge with grace was always something that had eluded me to that point in my life. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t match my siblings as they were a decade older; by choice I ran with a very fast crowd academically and at my first post-collegiate job I quickly got in over my head, which led to excruciatingly long workweeks. Holding forth at a cheese counter allowing people to discover which fresh chevre or washed rind cheese they liked best while being able to discuss the difference between say Chaumes or Beaumont, gave me a cherished sense of authority.

This was a big improvement over that first post-collegiate gig at a market research firm, but retail had several other inherent advantages over working in an office. At the office, implementing any decision meant coalition building, getting two or three fellow supervisors on board selling it to a principal to sell it to the client. The daily staff meetings went on forever as my colleagues and I tried to show off how knowledgeable we were about pesticides in North Carolina, computerized banking or something else similarly irrelevant to our lives then. And lastly there were status turf wars everywhere to be the lead African-American (which is phrasing it far too gracefully) or some parallel battle.

Alliances, crucial for office survival didn’t come easily for me. I was always a good fit on some points but not on others. Coming from Chicago’s South Side, I had street cred, but I also had this Ivy League degree (Columbia Class of '82) which made me seem very middle class. I loved music, but instead of pop or house music, my affection was for jazz which was pretty far off most cultural maps. For every possible African American sub group, I was a lego lock on some points and a complete misfit on others and when you're in your early 20s the misfitting matters a lot.

By contrast, retail didn’t require much finesse; if you needed to do something, for instance pull a product of dubious freshness off of the sales floor, you just did it then you told whoever was responsible what you had done. Meetings were very few and very far between. There were of course turf battles since retail staffs consist of human beings, but the pace of the job mitigated them quickly.

In every workplace there are all hands on deck moments where all personal friction is put aside and everyone jumps in to get the job done. In some offices that happens a few times a month, others once a week. In retail specialty food, it happens two or three times a day, and all day Saturday and Sunday. It’s hard for too much friction to build up in that environment, and alliances are pretty fluid. There was one other aspect that attracted me to retail, the hours. I knew from my stint in Texas that retail managers hated overtime. I took a 25 hour a week schedule secure with the knowledge that while I might occasionally work 40 hours, the 100 hour workweeks, a staple of my time in market research, were gone for good.