“You can save 50 centimes there”

A new Migros Market opened in the Rebgasse in Basel in 1958, with an enormous shop floor of 1,800 m2 and around 2,700 products. But customers didn’t have to carry all their purchases around: shopping trolleys were provided for the first time in Migros’ history.

In 1958, at Rebgasse in Kleinbasel, the then-largest Migros Market in Switzerland is created. With this branch, the sales area of the Basel Migros Markets has quadrupled within just six years as the Rebgasse branch offers the customers a shopping experience on 1,800m2. And with more than 2,700 articles for sale, the customers are, for the very first time, provided with shopping trolleys, “which make carrying shopping baskets from stall to stall unnecessary”.
Also new is the “radio and television display section” and the MM Studio where lectures take place and films are shown in the afternoons for housewives and children. In the entrance area, Hotelplan sells holidays from a “unique globe counter approximately four metres high”, and for the first time, the Migros rents floor space to a third party for a kiosk.
On the opening day, 10,000 visitors come to this new Eldorado. The motto of the day is: “You can save 50 centimes here and a franc there – Migros prices help you save.” Migros means this quite literally, as, according to the Brückenbauer, each customer “on this memorable day will receive a glittering coin in a plastic collection tube. This is to remind customers that although Migros has experienced many external changes since its foundation, its activities are always carried out with the aim of helping families through the worries of their daily lives.”