Part of my new job of being phunemployed includes taking care of all of the grocery shopping, so I thought I would give you all a little tour of my part time ‘office.’  Since we’ve been in Switzerland I’ve only gone to two grocery stores, one called Coop City, which is right across the street but a little expensive, and the other called Migros, which is slightly cheaper and two blocks away in the Metropole mall.  There is also a farmers market on our street every Saturday, but the prices don’t seem much better so I haven’t shopped at it.  For cheaper groceries we were advised to try a store called Denner, or Aldi (the same company that is in the US).  However both those stores are a little farther away.

For this post I brought my camera and a pen and paper through both Migros and Coop city.  I took pictures of anything that seems different than the US, and wrote down prices to show what we’ve been spending here.

At the entrance of Migros there is a little gate that opens to let you in, but doesn’t open to let you out (see below).  Coop City trusts their customers not to shoplift more and doesn’t have this.  In both stores once inside there is an obvious main path that takes you through the whole store, past the milk in the far back corner, through the aisles of dry goods, and finally to the cashiers at the exit.

The first section you walk through is produce.  To buy items by weight is a little different here.  After you pick out the produce you want, you have to weigh it on a computerized scale.  Type in the number associated with your item, then take the sticker with the price and a bar code and stick it to the produce bag for the cashier to scan at checkout.

It was an embarrassing experience to figure this system out.  The first time I wanted to buy tomatoes I put some in a bag and brought them up to the cashier, expecting her to weigh them.  She didn’t speak any English and it took me maybe 30 seconds to understand by her gestures that I was the one that had to weigh them.  I rushed back to the produce section, and luckily a customer by the scale was able to show me through more gestures how the scale worked with the item number.  Then I rushed back the cashier to buy my tomatoes after holding the line up for a few minutes.  Apparently this faux pas is an American rite of passage here; Melissa’s boss made the exact same mistake during his first Swiss shopping trip .

After the produce section, both stores have the same layout of a bakery, followed by a butcher/deli.  Unlike in the US, we’ve been buying the fresh bakery bread instead of sliced bread.  It tastes very good and fresh, and it’s actually cheaper than the sliced bread.

Next is the dairy section.  There is, of course, a huge selection of cheese with mold and funny names, but what strikes me as different and strange is that the milk and eggs are just put out in the open on a self.  No refrigeration at all. Apparently the milk goes through “ultra high temperature pasteurization” and it’s stored in sterilized containers. This gives the milk a shelf life on the order of a few months… it sounds a little weird, but we haven’t found any chunks in our milk yet!

There are large freezer sections in both stores, but our freezer is so small I don’t shop for frozen food often.  They don’t have as much easy microwave food like corn dogs, burritos, or hot pockets as the US.  The main frozen foods seem to be vegetables, ice cream, fish, meat, and pizza.

After frozen foods are all the aisles of dry goods. These have similar items to the US.  One big difference, though, is that both stores have entire aisles dedicated to chocolate bars.  And I mean just chocolate bars, there is a different aisle for types of candy bars and sweets.

The checkouts here work similar to those in the US; you can either go to a line with a person or use a self checkout line.  Grocery bags, though, have to either be purchased (about .30 CHF each) or brought in.

Right after the checkouts there is a recycling area. The garbage/recycling system in Switzerland is so complex and confusing it warrants its own separate post. Certain items like plastic, batteries, and light bulbs have to be brought back to the store instead of being picked up by the garbage man.

The layout and contents aren’t the only difference between faire les courses in Switzerland and the US. Below is the list I gathered of grocery prices in Switzerland.  I tried to write down the lowest price I found between the two stores.  The prices are in francs, and the exchange rate moves a lot. Right now if you’re wondering about prices in dollars it would be about 10% more than the CHF. In one of the upcoming posts I’ll write a little more about how our diet has actually changed because of the prices and availability of different foods here.