The discount behemoth Takeya, located near Okachimachi Station, may not be the cheapest place to buy anything you want, but it's probably the cheapest place to buy everything you want. Comprising half a dozen purple-painted buildings clustered together along Showa-dori, the store gets by on volume and an almost neurotic obsession with using space effectively.
The food sections, which take up the bottom floors of two neighboring buildings, are usually impossible to move through, since the aisles barely accommodate two bodies standing abreast of each other. And when the buses discharge the Asian tourists, as they do several times a day, the place turns into writhing mass of nylon-coated humanity, reaching and pushing and grunting and paying. The announcement are provided in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. No English. They know who shops there.
There's more: all the electronics you can think of short of computers; expensive leathers and high fashion at discount prices; four floors of furniture; a full liquor store that charges the lowest prices in town; a huge pet store set right next to a full-service bicycle shop; cosmetics and drugs and stationery. There's even a jewelry store.