No more cramped aisles, hidden products at this Macon record shop. See the expansion

Macon music fans must no longer shimmy through tight quarters and sift through mountains of crates at Fresh Produce Records.

The popular downtown record store expanded into the vacant space next door, giving the owners an opportunity to create more room for patrons.

While slipping through narrow aisles in a physical media store may a dream for some, co-owners William “Willie D” Dantzler and William Lonnie Rutledge said it wasn’t a practical way to display all of their products. Those crammed-in, hidden items got their long-awaited spotlight with the expansion that opened at the end of August at 567 Cherry Street.

“This is very much just us letting it all hang out after sucking our gut for about two years,” Rutledge said.

Rutledge and Dantzler moved everything over to the new storefront except vinyl records — those now take up the entire original side. Most customers had never seen every item in the original shop because products were buried behind or beneath each other.

“You couldn’t go through the store in even two or three hours …,” Rutledge said. “It takes days of coming in and going through, piece by piece.”

The new storefront — which runs under the same company but without a connected doorway — has CDs, VHS tapes, magazines and Fresh Produce-themed merchandise.

A silly doodle of a smiling onion with a Fresh Produce yard sign was hand-drawn by Dantzler and resembles the homey, unpretentious feel of the shop. It’s one of the store’s most popular designs on t-shirts and hats.

“It’s really kind of dangerous giving us this much artistic expression …,” Rutledge said. “We’re just out here being little goofy artists and trying to make a space for other goofy, artistic music lovers and people that love media.”

The storefronts make up around 4,000 to 4,500 square feet. He hopes the company will keep expanding and reach at least 7,000 square feet.

As their revenue increases, they will buy new products and displays. Rutledge called Fresh Produce his “little bonsai tree.”

“I just like to work on it daily,” he said. “Every single week I say, ‘What money do we have from last week to add to this and build out another section?’”

He attributed that mentality to his experience as a former manager of a family-owned butcher shop and grocery store. He became the manager of Fresh Produce in 2018, around when the shop almost closed. He became a co-owner a few years later, then the shop moved from Martin Luther King Boulevard to Cherry Street in 2022.

“They were about to get out of the business,” Rutledge said. “I was like, ‘Well let me try what I can try and see what I can do in the record business ….’ It was a whole thing.”

A full service bar on the new side was not yet open at the start of September, but it was still in the plans, according to Rutledge. Five refrigerators full of an array of soda, energy drinks, tea and other beverages were already up and running.

He plans to offer other items typically sold at a convenience store at affordable prices. Two small corner stores exist downtown, including on Third Street and Cherry Street Lane, as well as on Cotton Avenue and Mulberry Street Lane.

“Accessibility is our whole thing,” Rutledge said. “Downtown has a lot of things that are not being done in the core of downtown, and I’ve hit this point of, well, we got a game plan.”

The musician said he’s open to critiques but he’s his own worst critic, which helped him improve the business.

His goal is to make every music listener feel at home, from 1500s classical, to 2025 anime soundtracks and everything in between.

“I had a realization a few months ago that we’re in the American South and I didn’t have a Cajun-Creole section,” Rutledge said. “It’s a never-ending process of building as good of a library as you can for people to come in and enjoy.”

It’s one of two major record shops in Macon. In a city known for its musical roots — birthing Little Richard, Otis Redding and The Allman Brothers Band, to name a few — it’s about time Macon gets a bigger record store, Rutledge said.

“Macon is long overdue for a media store that is as universal as it can be, given Macon’s music town status that we talk so much about…,” he said. “You can’t walk through the middle of Nashville without hitting a few record stores … and that’s what we’re trying to be.”

The 34-year-old spoke for seven minutes about his appreciation for physical media. He owns thousands of records at his home.

“If you love an album, sit down in front of two speakers and just listen to it…,” Rutledge said. “You can’t ignore something when it’s sitting on a shelf … It’s some wholesome shit.”

Rutledge, who plays guitar, bass and percussion, hopes the shop will inspire endearing connections to music, increase diversity and discourage “binary perceptions” of music, like the word mid, or mediocre, used by young people in the digital age.

“I want to call Bob Dylan and just be like, ‘Man, I don’t know if you know this but, mid album bro,’” Rutledge said, jokingly. “Call Bob, tell him his album’s mid. He’d just be like, ‘Man, it was the 80s.’ God, no one tell Bob Dylan I said that.”

This story was originally published September 8, 2025 at 2:49 PM.