Fresh Produce Records spins a bigger tune downtown

Vinyl, CD and cassette listeners who frequent downtown Macon’s Fresh Produce Records can now visit the music shop’s new storefront and browse an expanded selection of tunes.

A fixture of downtown since it opened in 2013, the new storefront is located adjacent to the current shop on Cherry Street. The store was originally located on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard before it moved to Cherry in 2022.

“We’ve grown consistently, and every time we run out of space, we just find a way to get more,” co-owner William Rutledge said.

The new space includes records, Fresh Produce merchandise and a wall of beverage coolers. Rutledge said he plans to offer beer and wine in the future.

The store’s expansion in August is just a stepping stone toward the curation of a much larger inventory, he said.

“What we already have is impressive on an international level,” Rutledge said. “I’m trying to make it twice as big.”

Fresh Produce attracts music aficionados from all over the world — places like the Netherlands, Germany and Japan — and Rutledge said he aims to offer a range of music so that every customer walks away with “a little piece of the store that’s home to them.” 

“The thing that gets people to drive from other states and out of town and visit us from out of the country is an immaculate collection of music to look through,” Rutledge said. “This is just gonna be twice as big now.”

Rutledge said he spends 30 hours a week selecting music to add to the shop’s inventory and, for every record sold, he buys two more.

“The first thing to understand in this business is that my taste in music doesn’t matter,” he said.

Rutledge said he sometimes sells a few thousand records in one day — but he added that the job feels more like a hobby than work. 

“If you go into a restaurant, you want whoever’s cooking the food to be passionate about the food,” he said. “This is just a thing I’m passionate about.”