Mystic - Purple-haired Margot Johnstone took a moment Friday to bow before a sign inside Puritan & Genesta, acknowledging the longtime health food store's last official day of business.

"Thank you, Puritan and Genesta, you served me well for 28 years," said the Stonington resident before passing through the doors of the downtown mainstay one last time.

After more than 35 years, the store affectionately known as P&G - named after two yachts that waged a famed battle for the America's Cup more than a century ago - has ended its long run of selling all-natural food, beauty products, vitamins and supplements.

"It's sad that the community is losing something you can just walk to," said Elaine Mills of Stonington.

"It's another mom and pop-type store like what we just lost with Universal (Food Store) in Noank," added Jeanne Clark of Noank.

Christine Cooney, who has owned P&G for the past 13 years and brought the health-food emporium from a little hole-in-the-wall space on Main Street to a prominent 5,000-square-foot spot near Mystic's historic bascule bridge, said the store's demise was a combination of factors ranging from increased competition to traffic problems to the loss of electricity for three days after Tropical Storm Irene hit Connecticut last month.

Her rent of nearly $10,000 a month didn't help, Cooney said, but that wasn't a problem in the halcyon days of the business, when the store grossed nearly $2 million annually.

Now, however, stores like Ocean State Job Lot have huge quantities of organic products at prices that a small store like P&G can't match. Most supermarkets also have increased their natural-foods offerings, and Fiddleheads Food Cooperative in New London also carved into business, Cooney said.

After a disastrous winter, when the store's sales were down 50 percent thanks largely to traffic problems created by one-way alternating traffic on the Mystic River bridge and a streetscape project that made traveling downtown difficult, Cooney decided to reduce the size of P&G in May back to the site's original 3,000 square feet to cut rental costs. But by then the store already was in a death spiral, she said, as inventory had to be cut to pay rents that her landlord was insisting on.

"You can't run a grocery store business in a high-rent district," she concluded.

At its height, P&G employed about a dozen people, including four or five full-timers. On Friday the staff was down to two, and at 6 p.m. they, too, were officially unemployed.

Cooney said she might open up the store to customers who show up next week if she is around, but Friday was the last official day.

"Nowhere replaces this," said Johnstone, the regular customer from Stonington. "It was a wonderful institution."

The store, which opened in 1976 in the building on Holmes Sreet where Anthony J's restaurant now stands, was one of the first natural-food store options in the region at the time. Original owner Jack Dupree sold the business three years later to Marlynn Benker, who in turn passed it along to Ann Lazarek.

Cooney bought the business from Lazarek in 1998 when it was on West Main Street. Five years later, with business booming, she decided to make the move to 2 Holmes St., in the old Mystic Pharmacy.

"It was a no-brainer," she said.

She started with 3,000 square feet, and about two years later nearly doubled the size.

But now the business is changing, and as the economy deteriorated people started looking for bargains, she said, either through coops or at large chain stores. Already having withstood the traffic snarls and a transformer that caught fire and shut down electricity for a day and a half earlier in the year, Cooney said the final straw was Irene, which forced her to throw out hundreds of dollars worth of food.

"It was the perfect storm," she said.

Cooney said she feels bad that P&G, reputed to be the second-oldest store in downtown after Mystic Disc, is going out of business on her watch, but there was nothing she could do. In retrospect, she added, she probably should have bailed out a year earlier.

"It was a good run," she said.

But she hints that the Puritan & Genesta name, which she still owns, could return someday soon to downtown once she settles her financial difficulties. A P&G reprieve likely would involve retaining the food-preparation side of the business, she said, since that appeared to be the strongest revenue-generator at the end.

"Who knows?" Cooney smiled, eyeing photos of the English and American yachts that took on the America's Cup challenge in 1885. "P&G could be sailing into a new future."

l.howard@theday.com