Daiso Haul: How Korea's Dollar Store Became a YouTube Genre

In short

Daiso Korea posted record sales of 4.5 trillion won in 2024, overtaking Lotte Mart, while foreign card spending at its stores kept climbing every quarter after. The "Daiso haul" video genre that grew up alongside those numbers says something specific about how thoroughly "cheap and well-designed" became a Korean retail identity rather than a budget compromise.

A dollar store isn't supposed to be a travel destination. Nobody plans a trip abroad around a chain best known for plastic organizers and seasonal decorations. Daiso Korea broke that rule quietly enough that it's easy to miss how far it's actually gone — tourists now build entire itinerary stops around it, film themselves shopping it, and post the results for millions of people who will never set foot in the store.

The clip is the same one over and over: a basket filling up with skincare, stationery, and character goods, a running tally of how little the whole thing cost, and a caption insisting none of it looks like it came from a store where everything is a few thousand won.

A tourist filming a receipt in Myeongdong

Myeongdong's flagship Daiso has become something close to a fixture on Seoul shopping itineraries specifically because it offers immediate tax refunds to foreign visitors at checkout — a detail that matters, because it turns an impulse stop into a deliberately planned one. Travel and beauty outlets covering the store describe a specific, repeatable draw: Korean beauty brands releasing exclusive, stripped-down versions of their bestselling products through Daiso, priced at three to four dollars instead of their usual retail cost. The pitch writes itself for a camera — the same serum, a fraction of the price, sitting on a shelf next to hair clips and phone cases.

The numbers behind the videos

The content didn't invent the trend so much as document a retail shift that was already well underway. Daiso Korea posted record sales of 4.5 trillion won in 2024, with operating profit of 442.4 billion won, up 19.2 percent year-on-year (Korea Herald) — a result that, notably, surpassed Lotte Mart's domestic sales for the first time. By 2025, Daiso Korea had reportedly reached $3 billion in annual sales at a company valuation near $7.9 billion, operating around 1,600 stores nationwide.

Foreign tourist spending is a specific, tracked part of that growth rather than an incidental side effect. Reporting on the company's recent performance notes foreign card payments at Daiso rose 50 percent in 2024, 60 percent in 2025, and a further 70 percent in the first quarter of 2026 alone — three consecutive jumps that track almost exactly with the period the haul-video genre spread furthest on YouTube and TikTok.

That progression matters because it rules out the simplest explanation — that Daiso's foreign popularity is just a one-time viral spike that will fade the way most single-video trends do. A spike shows up once and levels off. Three straight years of accelerating growth in foreign spending, each one bigger than the last, looks more like a destination that keeps earning repeat visits and word-of-mouth than a moment that happened to go viral once and got lucky.

The pitch writes itself for a camera — the same serum, a fraction of the price, sitting on a shelf next to hair clips and phone cases.

What actually fills the basket

The haul format sorts fairly cleanly into a few repeating categories, and none of them are the household basics a dollar store is traditionally built around. Skincare and makeup dupes are the headline draw, positioned in coverage as budget stand-ins good enough to replace pricier originals rather than as cheap alternatives to apologize for. Stationery hauls are their own steady subgenre, often tied to seasonal drops timed around back-to-school or holiday themes. Character collaborations — licensed lines with Disney and Sanrio properties turned into travel pouches, compact mirrors, and hair accessories — round out the format with the kind of collectible appeal that gives a haul video a natural narrative arc: which items were the "must-grabs" before they were gone.

The format also leans on a running joke that shows up in nearly every haul video's comment section: disbelief at the final total. A basket that looks, on camera, like it should cost fifty or sixty dollars regularly rings up closer to twenty — and that gap between visual impression and actual price is the real payoff the genre is selling. It's a much more watchable structure than a typical shopping video, because the reveal isn't "here's what I bought," it's "here's what I got away with," which is a more compelling hook regardless of the store or the country it's filmed in.

The three-dollar serum that sold out nationwide

What separates Daiso's version of "cheap" from an ordinary dollar-store bargain is that the products keep selling out at a scale that outpaces supply, not just interest. Retail coverage in 2026 described Daiso "cementing its status as a lifestyle platform" specifically through sell-out beauty and apparel lines — language that would sound out of place applied to almost any other dollar-store chain anywhere, and reads instead like something written about a fashion label managing hype drops. The apparel segment alone posted a 34 percent year-on-year sales increase in 2024, a growth rate far more typical of a design-forward retailer than a discount one.

A dollar store isn't supposed to be a destination

What the sales numbers and the haul videos are both pointing at is the same underlying shift: "cheap" stopped functioning as an apology in Korean retail and started functioning as a design category in its own right. A Daiso haul video isn't structured like content about finding a good deal despite a store's limitations. It's structured like content about a store that happens to also be extremely affordable — closer in tone to a smart, deliberate copy of something pricier than to a compromise anyone needs to justify.

That reframing is exactly what turns a retail chain into travel content worth filming. Nobody makes a haul video apologizing for where they shopped. The genre only works because enough people have decided a Daiso basket is worth showing off — proof that a certain kind of Korean retail bet, cheap and well-designed rather than cheap and just good enough, paid off well beyond what the stores themselves were originally built to be.

Why the genre travels so easily

Part of what makes Daiso hauls such an efficient content format is how little friction sits between watching one and being able to recreate it. A viewer doesn't need a plane ticket to try the trend the way they would for, say, an open-run line outside a bakery — they need a Daiso location, which by 2025 meant one of roughly 1,600 options across the country, plus, increasingly, international branches. The low price point does similar work on the psychological side: a haul built around three-dollar items invites a viewer to imagine trying it themselves in a way a luxury haul never quite manages, because the cost of being wrong about whether an item is actually worth it rounds down to almost nothing.

The aesthetic side of the genre also borrows heavily from Korea's broader, well-documented instinct for turning ordinary consumption into something photogenic — the same instinct that built an entire café culture around visually stylized products rather than plain ones. A Daiso haul succeeds as content specifically because the products themselves already look considered: color-coordinated packaging, minimalist labels, seasonal collections styled like a proper retail line rather than a clearance bin. The videos aren't dressing up cheap items to look better than they are. They're filming items that were already designed to photograph well, at a price point that used to guarantee they wouldn't be.

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