Daiso to open in Vancouver, WA

[Romr123]

We were a few days late to a grand opening in Phoenix last December--looked quite nice and we bought a good bit. Second-tier strip center with a Dutch Bros. in the parking lot north of the airport.

[SamSpade]

Maybe people just want a surprise.
Luckily their next door neighbor is a Sola Salon franchise so the breezeway could be blocked.
About 1/3 of the nearby plates are from Oregon.

[storewanderer]

Maybe people just want a surprise.
Luckily their next door neighbor is a Sola Salon franchise so the breezeway could be blocked.
About 1/3 of the nearby plates are from Oregon.

How many people do they actually let into the store at once? It is very easy to put on a show with this sort of thing when you limit how many people can go into the store at once.

[Brian Lutz]

If there's that many people in line, it is likely that they are having to enforce the occupancy limit set by the fire marshal. I remember that when the Ross stores reopened up in Washington after the COVID shutdowns (which closed them completely for about 3 months) they had what I presume was a temporary occupancy limit of 45 people in the store at a time.

Another thing about Daiso stores to consider is that store sizes can vary quite a bit. For example, the International District Daiso in Seattle can't be more than about 4,000 SF (and that's being generous) and in the past I've seen their stores in some pretty tiny mall spaces. I think they have generally moved toward larger stores though, and the largest I'm aware of is the Crossroads store in Bellevue, which is probably a good 15-20k SF. Before I moved I typically shopped at the Lynnwood store (which hopped around a few different spaces inside Alderwood Mall before moving into an outbuilding next to the mall) was probably around 8,000 SF. The pictures of this store I can find seem to suggest that this one is firmly at the larger side of that range though, with lots of shelves and reasonably wide aisles.

Over in Japan some of the Daiso stores can be huge though; I've seen YouTube videos of three-story Daiso stores that are probably the size of a small department store.

[storewanderer]

Daiso hired some former Wal Mart executive to try and run store operations in the US so maybe some things will improve.

Daiso's new stores have been shrinking in the US. They were moving toward 15-20k square foot type stores but seem to be back toward 10k or so square foot stores lately.

[SamSpade]

This store is a former Tuesday Morning but it is clearly from when they were relocating into larger spaces. It was roomy but I think had DAISO shelving.

It took about 45 minutes to go through the line, which was much faster than Saturday according to the employee monitoring door counts.

I felt the store was busy but not super crowded and the queue was just about perfect for the shopping size. It did allow checkout at their 2 registers to go quite quickly.

On my way home, I heard a radio ad introducing the new store and grand opening to the market.

[veteran+]

Why oh why would anyone wait in line for this kind of store?

I just do not get the time spent for this activity.

[ClownLoach]

Daiso is coming soon to Menifee, CA as well. Across the street from the (alleged) #1 SuperTarget location. I'll be there when it opens and the lines die down. I believe it is the first location in SW Riverside county.

One piece that makes sense for Vancouver, WA: I don't think they have much Asian supermarket presence there. Daiso has been rapidly expanding their food assortment (all ambient of course except for cold beverages). For shoppers of Asian foods these stores help fill the gap in the market and they would definitely line up especially with free giveaways.

[Brian Lutz]

Daiso hasn't made it to this part of the country yet (I believe the only Daiso stores on the East Coast are currently in New York) but a similar competitor by the name of Miniso has started opening some stores in the Southeastern US (Currently the map shows two in Charlotte and one each in Winston-Salem, Orlando, Miami, Atlanta and Roanoke VA plus several stores in the DMV area.) As far as I can tell the company is based in China, but sells similar Japanese-style merchandise (including a lot of Disney and Sanrio licensed character merchandise.) They are behind Daiso in store count right now but also seem to be expanding quickly (including in Northern California and the PNW) and also into areas Daiso hasn't reached yet.

Globally, Miniso claims to have over 5,400 stores in 105 different markets.

[storewanderer]

Miniso is a lot different than Daiso. Daiso has a lot of smaller items. Miniso has more of a cross section of items. Daiso definitely has more stuff. Daiso seems to run with significantly higher foot traffic than Miniso but maybe tickets run higher at Miniso.

Daiso's food selection is a complete joke, snack foods and not much else. Also some of the worst pricing I've seen on those snack food items anywhere. There is almost no food in the recent openings in AZ/NV. Very little food in the TX units I went into last summer too and those were larger units. I've seen more food in some of the older stores but it doesn't seem to be selling all that well.