A couple weeks ago, I wandered into a new store in the basement of Westlake Center and into another world.

The store is called Daiso, and it’s one of the few US locations of an enormous Japanese department store chain. They carry a wide variety of household products, most of which are identifiable to non-Japanese speakers. There’s a huge section of plates, bowls, teapots, and the like, both ceramic and plastic, with nice designs. You can get those green colanders, of course. Slippers, stationery, cookware, tools–it’s a department store. There’s a rather perfunctory food department which didn’t much appeal to me.

Even if you don’t already know about Daiso, I hope you’re sensing a punchline, and here it is: everything at Daiso costs $1.50. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. There are a few things for $2 or $5, or even $10, but these constitute certainly less than 10 percent of the items on sale. The hip notebooks that girls pay $10 for at Kinokuniya are $1.50. Mise en place bowls that I buy for $6 at Sur La Table? $1.50. It’s hard to get your head around, like a wacky TV segment where a guy tries to give away free stuff on the street.

The quality is, as you’d expect, variable. I would not buy a $1.50 chef’s knife, but the dishes seem fine. They sell dozens of styles of little plastic food storage containers which are very cute. Probably they could snooker me into buying things that are normally less than $1.50. “You mean this potato is only $1.50? Awesome–hey, wait a minute.” They have a decent selection of drill bits, for example, but I can’t remember what they charge for drill bits at the hardware store.

Today I ended up with some of those green vegetable-preserving bags and a little tennis game for Iris. There’s also a Daiso at Alderwood Mall and one in Richmond, BC. It will definitely freak you out.