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Sewing Machines & School. By 1941 Duttweiler had amassed a fortune of $4,000,000. With a characteristic disregard for the conventional, he decided he had little use for great wealth or good living. So he gave away his Migros stores to his family of 120,000 registered customers, one share apiece, turning the whole business into a cooperative. 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 live without servants, and from which he drives to work in a mouse-sized Fiat two-seater. Duttweiler stayed on as president of the Migros cooperative at $9,000 a year, but three years ago gave up that salary, too.
Migros now has 289 grocery stores—145 of them self-service and ten of them fancy supermarkets—as well as nine butcher shops, three clothing stores, and 70 sales trucks that service rural areas. And Migros has revolutionized other fields as well. 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, bailed the hotels out, and last year grossed $6,000,000. In 1951 the Migros cooperative organized "Minitax," which runs a fleet of small blue taxis in Zurich, Lucerne, Lausanne and Geneva, charges fares 30% lower than usual rates. Last summer Migros bought the Turissia sewing-machine factory, cut prices about 13% and has since doubled output. Migros also provides evening schools for adults, runs a book club with 37,000 members, distributes long-playing records at discounts of 42% to 50%, publishes the Zurich daily Die Tat (circ. 35,000), has helped finance such Swiss movies as Marie-Louise, The Last Chance, Four in a Jeep and Heidi.
Because of his remarkable success at home, the governments of Turkey, Brazil and Puerto Rico have asked Duttweiler to help in bringing down their living costs, too. The Greek government invited him to be its guest this month to discuss the possibility of starting a Migros-like system for Greece. Duttweiler, who calls himself a revolutionary in business and a conservative in politics, has the same advice for all in beating down Communism. Says he: "There is no point in fighting Communism with speeches and pamphlets. You have to fight Communism in the kitchen."