“Only capital forces capital”

In 1941 Migros was converted from a public limited company to a cooperative. Gottlieb Duttweiler and his wife Adele essentially gave away the company to their customers. The motivation behind this extraordinary move is still not entirely clear. Migros is worth an estimated CHF16 million when founder Gottlieb Duttweiler and his wife Adele decide to change it to a cooperative in 1940 and thus, as it were, give it away. At the end of the year, about 75,000 shares at CHF30 each are given to Migros customers. Many are puzzled by this decision. Historians understand the change as a reaction in particular to the world situation and quote Duttweiler’s statement that if the Nazis were to occupy Switzerland, it would be more difficult for them to “expropriate from hundreds of thousands of small cooperative members than from one single millionaire”.

But this explanation falls short as Duttweiler has been occupied by the thought for a long time. In the spring of 1933, he lectures at a “public conference on the subject of the economy” in Binningen on the question: “Migros – a future cooperative?” In the same year, the Migros subsidiary in Ticino constitutes itself as a cooperative, and soon after Duttweiler establishes both the packaging company Sabina and Hotelplan as cooperatives.

Duttweiler is a politically minded and engaged person with high ethical standards. But he is also a private person. In the year Migros becomes a cooperative, he is 52 years old and has no heirs to whom he can pass on the business.