A bastion of Chinese socialism - a place entrenched in Beijing lore dating to 1959 and a rival to the Great Wall in visits by foreigners - has closed its doors.
Known as the Friendship Store, the three-building complex was off limits to ordinary Chinese until the 1990s. But for diplomats, visiting dignitaries, and intrepid tourists, it was the only place in the communist capital to buy shaving cream, a decent piece of cheese, or a scarf guaranteed to be 100 per cent silk.
In today's China - where 'every store seems a friendship store', as a local scholar puts it - the Friendship property was a hulking anachronism with overpriced, outdated products. It suffered its ostensible coup de grace from the tourist-depleting Sars epidemic. Late last month, about 400 out of 800 Friendship employees were laid off, with little advance notice.
The shuttering of the Friendship Store last week and the sit-in that followed - not an illegal protest, insist the former workers - illustrate the complexities of a China desirous of a more transparent economic climate running up against a regime that still wants to show who's boss.
Last week, as more than 500,000 citizens of Hong Kong flexed their freedom muscles to protest against Article 23, the newly unemployed of the Friendship Store huddled silently beneath two huge red lanterns in a doorway of their former workplace in Beijing.
'I worked nine years here and I was given two days' notice,' says a young woman, afraid to give her name. 'It wasn't really even a notice. Our managers aren't being clear with us. But they are on the inside, and we are on the outside.' The workers want to talk to city officials directly, but say their bosses have shut down all efforts at dialogue.