As part of its 100-year anniversary, Migros will be sending a special “Thank You” to Switzerland in the form of its own bus. The Merci Bus will be criss-crossing the cantons throughout 2025, stopping at 100 different towns along the way.
Called the Merci Bus, the specially converted vehicle will be taking to the roads and motorways of Switzerland between March 6 and October 18. The bus itself will be packed with 100 of the supermarket's most iconic products, which will change based on the preferences of each town it visits.
Alongside the possibility of doing your weekly shop on the bus, Migros will also be offering a selection of products for free. These “can be anything from butter plaited bread to cervelat to ice tea”, the company wrote. Coffee, cake, apples and syrup will also be offered to anyone who comes across the bus.
The bus itself is a recreation of the sales trucks which Migros first launched when it was founded in 1925. These vehicles would visit rural towns and cities across Switzerland, staffed by a sales representative and laden with various products.
These trucks were phased out between 1965 and 1976 and replaced with larger buses. These would park in the centre of towns and operate as a mobile supermarket in a bid to give smaller communities access to their own store. However, following the massive expansion of Migros in the 1980s, most of these trucks were scrapped. The very last mobile stores, operating in certain valleys in the mountains of Valais and Ticino, were phased out in 2007.
To find out whether your town is one of the 100 being visited by the Migros Merci Bus in 2025, check out the official list.
Founded in Zurich in 1925 by Gottlieb Duttweiler, Migros is one of (if not the, depending on how you count) largest supermarkets in Switzerland. The company itself, a cooperative, was founded based on Duttweiler's 15 theses, which among other things barred its main stores from selling tobacco and alcohol and required the firm to lower its prices if its profits exceed 5 percent of the market value of the company.
Despite a long and varied history, the last year has been one of change for Migros, with the company selling off its various subsidiaries in a bid to cut down on deficits and expand on its profitable supermarkets. Most recently, Migros announced that it had sold its Micasa and Hoteplan branches, and would close its 31 Do it + Garden stores affecting 466 jobs.
Thumb image credit: Migros