“I would do a few things around the shop, clean up, pick up paper, and stock the shelves,” she recalled. Later, she learned how to sell. “It’s the only job I ever had.”

Though the shop is small, no more than about 40 feet by 26 feet, there was never a desire to make it larger. They just wanted to add more homemade goodies that customers might not be able to find elsewhere.

“We wanted to stay as small as we could,” said Sheri Schaefer, the shop manager who began working there when she was 15. Now, after 41 years at Bobby Nelson’s, she too is retiring.

“We didn’t need to be the biggest cheese shop,” she explained. “We thrived on being the most-respected for quality products, fair prices and most of all excellent customer service.”

The customer service sometimes went beyond the counter.

“Many times customers that were unable to make it to our shop during business hours would request a mailbox pickup, meaning we would put their order together, put it in our large mailbox with an envelope,” explained Schaefer.

“Later in the evening, they would pick up their goodies, put the cash in the envelop and in the morning we would pick up the envelope. All about customer service and trust,” she added.