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.

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       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.

       “It’s a shame,” said Lucotch, 58, who works for a Catholic diocese and was counting on a prosciutto with original house dressing. “We always get sandwiches at the Cheese Shop,” said son Michael, 16, who favors the roast beef and havarti.

       Lift after quitting: What happened next to the workers who left their jobs

       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.

       Virginia’s unemployment rate plunged to 3.4 percent last month, below the national average of 4.2 percent, but hundreds of thousands of low-wage jobs remain unfilled. Retailers have had to cut back hours or services even as demand for goods has surged.

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       For a small business like the Cheese Shop, the combination is devastating.

       4.2 million workers quit their jobs in October

       “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.”

       Ordinarily, the Cheese Shop and its two adjoining businesses — the Wine Cellar and the Fat Canary restaurant — would have 80 employees during the busy holiday season, said her sister, Mary Ellen Power Rogers. Current employee head count is 49. Applications on file: zero.

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       For the past couple of weeks, three employees at the sandwich counter have been scrambling to fill some 1,500 orders per day, said Tony Dobson, 58, who has baked bread, stocked shelves and made sandwiches there for nine years.

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       “Wait times were an hour and 30 minutes,” Dobson said.

       “I’ve never, ever, ever seen anything like this,” said Tammy Schumacher, 56, who was still in high school when she started working at the shop 39 years ago.

       As the predicament dragged on, the owners met with employees to consider what to do. They had already cut back hours and days of operation at both the Fat Canary — where brother Tom Power Jr. is chef — and the shop.

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       Making matters worse, they’re having a hard time keeping the store stocked. That’s partly due to supply chain issues, Rogers said. Items such as plastic containers, bags and — most devastating of all — salty Virginia ham have become hard to get from suppliers.

       But the problem is also aggravated by a massive surge in customer demand. People were cooped up for more than a year, Pattisall said, and now they want to spend. “I mean, it’s crazy what people are purchasing and how many people are in our store and how often they’re coming back," she said.

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       That part, they admit, is a good problem. It’s just that the demand is burning out their depleted workforce.

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       Employees are "running around with their hair on fire and we’ve just got to protect them, got to find a way to keep them from losing the last vestige of sanity that they have,” Pattisall said.

       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.

       Founder Thomas Power helped start the local farmers market and maintained deep connections to local leaders as well as nearby William & Mary, which honored him and his wife for community service in 2017. Power died later that year.

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       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.

       When the local Virginia Gazette newspaper published an article about the decision early in the week, longtime customers reacted with something like panic. Some showed up in tears, Pattisall said. On Thursday morning, the first person at the lunch counter ordered 30 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.

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       “This place is iconic in the community,” he said. “We’ll put together sandwiches in the office in memory … I shouldn’t say in memory of. Hopefully they’ll come back.”

       Sometime next year, if a new wave of applicants comes forward and staffing returns to normal, Rogers and Pattisall said they’d like to resume the sandwich business.

       But in the meantime they’re enduring an emotional roller coaster with customers like Lindsay Mize of North Carolina, who grew up in Williamsburg and was back home visiting family on Friday.

       “It’s not a trip home without a trip to the Cheese Shop for sandwiches,” said Mize, 38, who jokingly begged her mother to apply for a job. “They just taste like home.”