CAPE ELIZABETH — After more than 60 years of Jones family ownership, Jonesy’s on Ocean House Road has been sold.

The Mobil gas station and convenience store will remain open and retain its name under the new ownership of Bangor-based R.H. Foster.

Gregg Jones, whose father first opened the business as a gas and repair shop in 1948, said this week that the economic downturn forced him to rethink the family business. Last year, the Westbrook man made renovations, closed the garage, and reopened Jonesy’s as a gas station and convenience store – just as gas hit $4 a gallon, he said.

It didn’t help that Cumberland Farms was also selling gas across the street.

“The economy changed everything,” he said, “numbers weren’t where they needed to be.”

In 2008, changing to the convenience-store model “was the way to go,” Jones said, since the business wasn’t surviving as a garage. Fuel supplier R.H. Foster helped Jones in his decision to open the Mobil “On The Run” franchise.

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“We would’ve been fine if the economy didn’t drop off the face of the earth,” Jones said. “It was just a matter of timing that it didn’t work out for me.”

The sale, which was completed earlier this month, came at the “appropriate time, in the best interest of my family,” he said, since they were struggling to make ends meet.

Jones will play no role in the future of Jonesy’s, and said this week he is currently looking for work.

He did express confidence in the new ownership, which has an office in South Portland.

“I was very pleased to find R.H. Foster,” he said, “I was glad that if anybody had to take it over, it was them.”

Sarah Trent can be reached at 781-3661 ext. 108 or strent@theforecaster.net.

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s-cejonesys.jpgGregg Jones at his family’s gas station and repair shop on Ocean House Road (Route 77) in Cape Elizabeth in May 2007. Jonesy’s was converted to a convenience store last year and has now been sold. (File photo)


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