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Hall of Fame Biographies

Gottleib Duttweiler

Migros

An unconventional retailer, Migros founder Gottlieb Duttweiler shaped Swiss economic history with a knack for business, tenacious attitude, bold ideas and a strong sense of social responsibility. Born in Zurich in 1888 he worked for two years as a farmer in Brazil but was shocked upon his return to Switzerland to discover that a planter netted less for his efforts in raising coffee than the grocer who merely handed it over the counter. To remedy that, Duttweiler invested his savings of in five model T Ford trucks and a stock of rice, flour, sugar and other staples, sent the trucks through the streets of Zurich as travelling Migros stores.

Dutti's prices averaged 30% less than those of his competitors, and customers swarmed to buy. As the rest of the Swiss food industry rose up in arms, Duttweiler branched out to Basel but the trucks were seized and drivers arrested. Dutti fought back in the courts and won. When, a year later, more trucks were seized in Bern, he showered the city with leaflets from an aeroplane and got the housewives to back him. As he fought a virtual street-by-street battle into other Swiss cities and villages, competitors set up a national boycott. Manufacturers who sold to him lost other customers, shoppers who traded at Migros trucks were turned away by other stores. Duttweiler started his own plants and broadened his merchandise lines.

By 1941 Duttweiler had amassed a fortune of $4m and gave away his Migros stores to his family of 120,000 registered customers, one share apiece, turning the whole business into a co-operative. For himself, he kept $250,000. He also turned his estate outside Zurich into an amusement park, moved into a four-room house where he and his wife lived without staff and from which he drove to work in a Fiat two-seater car. Duttweiler stayed on as president of the Migros cooperative at $9,000 a year, but eventually gave up that salary too.

In the Depression Duttweiler signed up a number of Swiss hotels, many of them half empty or near bankruptcy, in a plan to provide cheap vacation tours. His Hotel Plan, which offered eight-day, all-expense holidays for as little as $45, caught on quickly and bailed the hotels out. In 1951 the Migros cooperative organized ‘Minitax, to run a fleet of small blue taxis in Zurich, Lucerne, Lausanne and Geneva, charges fares 30% lower than usual rates. He bought the Turissia sewing-machine factory and provided evening schools for adults, a book club with 37,000 members, published the Zurich daily Die Tat and helped finance Swiss movies.

When the government passed laws directed against him and his stores, he formed his own political party and was elected to the Swiss parliament.

Duttweiler entered politics in 1935 as a member of the National Council and in 1962, the year of his death, he laid the foundation stone for the GDI, with the aim of building up an independent research institute for economic and social studies.