James S. Wood / Arizona Daily Star

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More than a month after the Tucson Cooperative Warehouse — aka ShopNatural Cooperative — apparently closed for good, questions linger about the 34-year-old natural-foods institution's demise.

ShopNatural had a small retail store for people to walk in off the street and buy goods, but it also spent decades trucking natural and organic goods to parts of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and the rest of Arizona.

Customers included other cooperatives as well as buying clubs — groups of people who banded together to place orders large enough to meet the minimum delivery requirement.

Now, a sign on the door of the retail entrance at 350 S. Toole Ave. thanks customers for more than 30 years of patronage and announces the establishment was to close by Dec. 29.

A more ominous notice posted beside that one announces that the landlord, Alan Levin, has taken control of the premises and everything inside in lieu of unpaid rent totaling $63,000 for August and September 2007 and January 2008.

Christopher Hahn, who is listed as president of the board of directors on the co-op's still-live Web site, didn't return messages left at his home in Maine.

Reached in New Mexico, board member Betty Mishuk said, "We don't want to make any comments on that," but she did confirm that the warehouse is permanently closed.

Here in Tucson, board member Dana Coyle said, "I just need to say 'no comment,' and that's what you're going to get from everybody else."

An annual report filed Jan. 18 with the Arizona Corporation Commission includes a balance sheet dated July 2007, showing cash assets had fallen to $74,684 from the previous year's $211,559. Total assets were listed at $941,439 — down from $1,439,415 the year before.

With the closure, cooperative warehouses in the United States may very well be extinct, said George Milan, a self-described "old hippie" who sits on the board of the nearby Food Conspiracy Co-op, 412 N. Fourth Ave.

Milan saw the birth of Tucson Cooperative Warehouse in the early 1970s, and he and a friend began the transportation part of the operation, he said.

He went on to work there for 23 years and continued shopping there regularly since he left the company about 10 years ago, he said.

"I saw it going down. I didn't know for sure it was going totally out," he said.

But looking at the industry as a whole, he wasn't surprised, he said.

"We were successful beyond our wildest dreams about changing the way America eats. And it was horrible for business, but it was good for America," he said.

Margaret Lund, who has run a community-development loan fund for food cooperatives in Minnesota for the last 15 years and is familiar with the national scene, said there has been a lot of consolidation in the cooperative market.

Increased consumer awareness of organic and health foods has brought those items into mainstream stores and has created large natural-food companies that have buying power the smaller co-ops can't compete with, she said.

"It's a tough business, it really is," Lund said. "There just isn't any room. It's all about price and moving stuff. It's a hard place to make a profit."

Tucson Cooperative Warehouse customers were saddened but not surprised when they learned the co-op was no more.

But they still don't know why it happened.

"I hope you're able to find out something. I'd like to know as well," said Sally Moss, who handled the finances for a small buyers' club in Amarillo, Texas, for 20 years ago.

ShopNatural's service "was great for years and years," she said. "We just ordered and the truck came."

Then more and more items were out of stock when the group placed orders, and a freight charge was added.

Last October, two days before an expected weekly delivery, Moss got a phone call saying the co-op wouldn't be sending trucks anymore, but the group was welcome to go online and order for shipping via UPS.

That meant no more frozen products, and it meant much higher shipping costs. The group didn't order anymore after that, she said.

"The quality of the service was not the same," Moss said. "We talked among ourselves that it wasn't going to last much longer with that kind of service, and it didn't."