Gratitude

The Joys of Daiso

A beloved Japanese store in an American suburb

I’ve enjoyed browsing the shelves at Daiso from the moment I first walked into one of the “Japanese variety and value store[s]” several years ago. I never know what creative and/or useful items I might find.

One of my favorite purchases would be sets of cloth socks to go on my dining room chair legs so that they don’t scratch my hardwood floors. The chairs have metal pieces at the bottom that don’t work well with felt pads; plus I find the socks delightful as they have animal faces sewn into them (I had black cat chair socks until they wore out, and now I have blue ones with bears).

If you’re thinking, “What’s up with this lady and her chair socks,” well, my girlfriend has had similar thoughts. She went to Daiso with me for the first time recently (she’d never been there on her own), and she said, “You’re like a kid in here, excited about everything.”

I’m aware of the plastic in the ocean and the junk in our landfills. I buy things like flower pots and stationery and eyeglass cleaning cloths — stuff that I use, but the Daiso versions often have a happy, irreverent quality to them that brings an extra bit of pleasure into daily objects and activities.

It was when I started shopping there with my foster daughter that I could truly say: I love Daiso. She loves it, too. We love to go down every aisle and look at everything, and we generally leave with art/craft/school supplies, one or two household items, and a couple of packages of Japanese snacks (we have limits!).

The Daiso in our suburb is small, neat as a pin, and never overwhelming. It’s relaxing because we don’t need anything there, but we find little things that we want, like pencils that smell like fresh fruit that my foster daughter wants to share with a couple of her friends who like to draw.

It’s also near the mall where my foster daughter’s mom works. My (former) foster daughter lives happily with her birth mom now. Sometimes I pick my foster daughter up after school, or I pick her up at the start of her mom’s shift at the mall in the summer, and then I drop her off at the mall when her mom finishes work.

So we find ourselves tantalizingly close to Daiso. We don’t go all the time, but we probably average about once every six weeks.

Do you have a business you visit with someone and consider it your special place that you like to go to together? I think people often visit certain restaurants or coffee shops or ice cream places or bakeries (etc) with a loved one and think of the spot as “our place.”

My foster daughter and I have our go-to spots for her favorite treats like taco salad and bubble tea, but our place is a 100 yen store where we can spend the better part of an hour selecting $15 worth of items to revisit and discuss in the car at the end of our day while we keep an eye out for her mom.

For another author’s reflection on something she loves, I invite you to read Danielle Hestand on her love of books.