Shopping and souvenirs

Opening hours

This is the practical part, and the one that spoils afternoons.

Shops generally open 09:00 to 18:30 or 19:00, Monday to Saturday, often closing earlier — around 17:00 — on Saturdays. Many towns have one late evening a week, usually Thursday.

Sundays everything is shut. Not most things: essentially everything, by law, with narrow exceptions.

The exceptions are worth memorising:

• Main railway stations. The shops inside Zurich, Bern, Geneva and Basel stations open on Sundays and late into the evening, including full supermarkets. This is where locals go when they have forgotten something.
• Petrol stations, for a limited range at inflated prices.
• Tourist areas — the old town in Geneva, some resort villages in season.
• December, when the rules loosen for Christmas shopping.

Smaller towns may also close for lunch, and outside the cities many shops shut on Monday mornings.

Outlets

Two proper outlet villages, both a manageable trip:

Landquart Fashion Outlet, in Graubünden, is about an hour from Zurich by train and the station is beside it. Around 160 shops, discounts typically 30–70% off list.

FoxTown Mendrisio, in Ticino near the Italian border, is larger and reachable from Lugano in twenty minutes. It also opens on Sundays, being in a canton with different rules — which makes it the exception to everything above.

Neither is cheap in absolute terms. Both are worth it if you were going to buy a Swiss brand anyway.

What is worth buying

Chocolate. The obvious one, and genuinely better here — but skip the airport and the souvenir shops. Buy it in Coop or Migros, where the same bars cost a third as much, or from a proper chocolatier such as Sprüngli in Zurich or Läderach.

Cheese. Vacuum-packed at any supermarket, and it travels. Gruyère, Emmentaler, Appenzeller and the raclette cheeses. Check your own country’s import rules before loading up.

A Swiss Army knife. Victorinox, still made in Ibach. Buy the model you will actually carry rather than the one with the most tools. Remember it must go in checked luggage.

Watches. The serious purchase, and the reason the tax-free scheme exists. Buy from an authorised dealer, keep the papers, and expect no bargaining.

Herbal sweets, Ovomaltine, Aromat. The supermarket shelf of things Swiss people abroad get homesick for, and much better value than anything with an edelweiss printed on it.

Cowbells, cuckoo clocks and edelweiss shirts are made for tourists, and the cuckoo clock is not even Swiss — it is from the Black Forest, in Germany.

Markets

Most towns hold a weekly market, usually a weekday morning, with produce, flowers and cheese. Bern’s is on Tuesday and Saturday under the arcades; Zurich has several through the week; the market in Vevey on the lake is among the best in the French-speaking part.

Christmas markets run through December in every town of any size — Montreux, Basel, Zurich, Bern and Lucerne have the largest.

Before you carry it home

Watch the value: goods worth more than 300 francs a head are dutiable when you re-enter Switzerland, and your own country has its own allowance on the way out. See customs.