From dollar shop to tourist magnet: Daiso overtakes Lotte Mart, other retailers in sales

About this episode

The episode discusses how Daiso has surpassed Lotte Mart in sales, becoming a popular destination for tourists in Korea.

This article is by Kim Min-young and read by an artificial voice. Walk into the 12-story Daiso in Myeongdong on any afternoon and you will struggle to hear Korean. Tourists drag rolling suitcases up the stairs because the elevator line is too long. They fill baskets with 1,000 won ($0.68) snacks and 3,000 won cosmetics. Foreign card payments at Daiso rose 50 percent in 2024, 60 percent in 2025 and another 70 percent in the first three months of 2026. A store where almost nothing costs more than 5,000 won has become one of the hottest retail stories in Korea. The foreign tourist surge is one of the reasons Daiso is currently towering over its competitors. The dollar-shop chain that started out selling 1,000 won household goods in 1997 booked 4.54 trillion won in revenue last year, surpassing Lotte Mart's domestic sales for the first time and threatening the dominance of Korea's traditional mart giants. In operating profit, Daiso has already left them behind. The chain posted 442.4 billion won in operating profit in 2025, dwarfing Emart's supermarket division at 87.2 billion won and Lotte Mart, which swung to a 7 billion won operating loss for the year. Daiso's operating margin…

Topics covered

• retail
• tourism
• business
• Korea
• Daiso
• Lotte Mart
• consumer behavior

Keywords

• Daiso
• Lotte Mart
• retail sales
• tourists
• Myeongdong
• operating profit
• Korea

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Daiso, Lotte Mart, Emart

Places: Korea, Myeongdong, Jung District

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