What Marsha Eats

From the FB pg Remembering Retail

While I explored this building a bit through it being a former A&P and SuperFresh, I didn't go into talking about The Fresh Market, its concept, and this store I captured in an exclusive Remembering Retail photo taken 6/6/2026 in Towson, MD.

The Fresh Market story begins in Greensboro, NC in 1982. Ray and Beverly Berry opened a store in a former Bi-Rite to be a better grocery store inspired by the European-style markets.

This store focuses heavily on prepared foods, fresh food concepts, and high-end meat, seafood and bakery items while selling gourmet, boutique and hard-to-find items you won't often see elsewhere. This is a small-scale foodie paradise type of place, and there's now 160 of them across the US, largely in the Southeast, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. They go as far west as Tulsa, and once tried to operate in California but quickly closed a few stores in the Sacramento area.

From the FB pg Retail Dead or Alive

In 1937, a town in Texas built a statue in honor of a cartoon sailor and put it in the middle of the town square. They weren’t joking around. He literally saved their entire economy.

Popeye first chugged a can of spinach on screen in 1931, purely because the animators needed a quick visual gag for an instant strength power-up. Spinach was cheap, canned well, and read clearly on black-and-white film. That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

But America was in the middle of the Great Depression, and spinach farmers were struggling badly. Then kids everywhere started watching a cartoon where the toughest guy on screen got his power from a vegetable can, and something wild happened: they actually started eating it. By 1937, US spinach consumption had jumped 33 percent. A national survey that decade found kids ranked spinach as their third favorite food, right behind turkey and ice cream.

Crystal City, Texas, called itself the Spinach Capital of the World and put up a statue of Popeye in 1937 to thank him personally.

It’s still standing today. An iconic on-screen joke about a sailor eating canned vegetables accidentally rescued an entire American crop during one of the worst economic collapses in the country’s history.

From the FB pg all you can eat