Gottlieb Duttweiler is a single-minded Swiss businessman who has spent the past 29 years working successfully toward one goal: bringing prices down. By steadily undercutting competitors, he has built an $85 million-a-year empire that started out with groceries and now includes taxi fleets, clothing stores, sewing machines and movies. In a nation of enterprising moneymakers, Duttweiler is the most enterprising of all. He is also unique in another way: years ago he gave away most of his wealth to his customers.
Duttweiler's successful price-cutting has frequently brought trouble from his cartel-minded competitors. But "Dutti," as he is fondly known to his customers, was never fazed by that. When manufacturers of standard brands refused to sell to his cut-rate "Migros" (like demigros, i.e., semi-wholesale) stores, he set up his own factories to turn out everything from soap to noodles. When newspapers turned down his ads, he started a paper of his own. When the government passed laws directed against him and his stores, he formed his own political party, was elected to the Swiss parliament by the biggest vote in history. Last week, to the consternation of the Swiss oil industry, Duttweiler started up a new business: retailing fuel oil. Result: prices immediately dropped more than 20%.
Ford Trucks & Flour. A bulking bear of a man, 66-year-old "Dutti" Duttweiler entered the business world 50 years ago as an apprentice in the Zurich wholesale grocery firm of Pfister and Sigg. Thirteen years later the company became Pfister & Duttweiler. But Dutti's main career of cutting prices—and conventional corners —began in 1925. Just back from several years as a coffee-and sugar-plantation owner in Brazil, Duttweiler was shocked 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 $25,000 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 traveling 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, Price-Cutter Duttweiler matched them blow for blow. When his business branched out to Basel, 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 airplane, 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, broadened his merchandise lines.