TOUR: Bert's Market - Folly Beach, SC

Bert's Market

Owner: Omar Colon

Opened: 1994

Cooperative: none
Location: 202 E Ashley Ave, Folly Beach, SC

Photographed: January 2022

There's only grocery store out here on Folly Island, and we're in luck -- because it's a really great one! The 6600 square foot Bert's Market seems to cater both to tourists and locals, based on its selection with equal parts food to go and regular groceries. It's also got a liquor store inside and has small but complete selections of produce, grocery, dairy, frozen, deli, bakery, meat, and even sushi.

The store seems to be more or less divided into two halves. On the left is the liquor store in front with grocery and frozen behind. On the right is the perishables: produce, dairy, meat, bakery/deli, and prepared foods. Above, the view is looking left immediately inside the entrance.

There's plenty of snack items, probably intended mostly for tourists, but there are also real grocery items...

This store, by the way, uses Food Club and Full Circle from Topco. I'm not sure if they use any intermediary distributor. Here's an overview of the grocery aisles from the back...

A good friend, who was also my roommate for two years, apparently went to Folly Beach regularly in his childhood. He was shocked when I showed him my pictures of this area, and also later said he remembered the Earth Fare in Charleston (which he confirmed when he saw my pictures).

Frozen foods are in the back of the left half of the store. And there are certainly some unusual products around the store, such as Captain John Derst's Good Old Fashioned Bread...

And now moving on to the perishables side of the store. The deli/sandwich/sushi counter is to the right in the below image, with produce, dairy, and meat to the left.

I think all of the produce sold here is organic. By the way, it looks like our shelves were a bit understocked just because I was here in January which is definitely the off-season. Bert's, famously, is open 24/7, 365 days a year.

And in the front we have deli, prepared foods, and sushi, with the register at the right side of this counter...

Bert's packs a lot of stuff into a very small space, and it's quite the fun store to look around and visit. Well folks, from here on out we are headed west of the city, moving out to Johns Island tomorrow for a store over on The Market Report!