Early-bird training went well. Afterward we lunched for two hours and stopped then only because one of us had a 4:00 client call.

Yesterday I received an e-mail message from the owner of the boutique just down the street that said that she has decided to close the store. Business has been slow, she said.

Our neighborhood is an unlikely area for a high-end niche clothing store. I always imagined that such businesses survived on copious foot traffic. There's a coffee shop next door, but I'm not sure that neighborhood residents camping out in cafes for the weekend are necessarily the same people willing to drop dime on high-priced hipster clothes.

Still, it added to the nascient sense of community on the block. Often, on weekends, I'd peek in to see what was there and to chitchat with the owner. Over the past year and a half or so, I've bought several things from her. Most recently, I bought something that I had seen and liked several months ago but that was initially too expensive. When I bought it, it had been marked down 70 percent. I wondered if the store would survive long.

High-end boutiques are one of the canaries in the coal mine. Seemingly superfluous to begin with, I'm sure they are the first to lose business when people look for ways to tighten belts. But I'm sad to see them go. Without them, all we have are chain stores.

After I completed the Japanese language intensive a couple of years ago, I wanted only to indulge in frivolous things. One weekend, I decided to tour as many boutiques as I could find to get a sense of these little shops that suddenly seemed everywhere. It was an interesting exercise. I learned that many of them carried the same brands and thus were not that different from each other. All were too expensive. Few seemed to have fixed on a signature style and to have done a little extra legwork to distinguish themselves. After surveying the field, very few seemed worth revisiting.

Now the boutiques are disappearing—returning from whence the came, I suppose. The one in my neighborhood, two others along my route to work. Other shops appear empty, but then it's not like they were ever packed out to begin with, which is one of the things that made them curiosities. I wondered how many items they needed to sell a day or a week to break even.

Similarly, the long list of online boutiques I had bookmarked now consists of more than a few broken links. Poof—gone, just like that. A few months ago, I could cruise them all. Now I'm loading 404s.

I'm sad to lose my little neighborhood shop. I certainly hadn't been wishing for a boutique to open in my neighborhood, but when it did it was an unexpected delight for our the street. I worry a bit about what will become of our block, which has developed into a something of a hub of neighborhood activity. This shop was one of its anchors. Will anything fill the empty space?