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My textbook has a sentence which reads,
Le samedi matin vers onze heures, j'adore retrouver mes amies pour visiter les magasins et les boutiques de notre centre-ville.
On Saturday mornings, around eleven o'clock, I like getting together with my friends to visit the shops and boutiques in our downtown.
Is a boutique just a more upscale version of a magasin? Is it the same distinction that we have here in America between shops and boutiques?
Magasin has several meanings and is generic when referring to shops while boutique is more about small and often specialized shops.
Technically, the magasin is more the back-end storage area while the boutique is the front-end store on the street. The magasin of a shop is still sometimes called its arrière-boutique.
Note that these words come from foreign words both originally meaning "storage area":
Boutique comes from the greek ἀποθήκη "apotheke" so boutiquier and apothicaire are related.
Magasin comes from the arabic مَخَازِن "makazin"
