Black Friday gets off to a slow start in Swiss shops

Black Friday gets off to a slow start in stationary retail Keystone-SDA

Black Friday has established itself as one of the biggest shopping events in Switzerland in recent years. This year, however, business was rather slow, especially in the stores.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

There is still no sign of a major shopping frenzy on Black Friday, as an inspection by the editorial team of AWP Financial News in Zurich city centre showed. Although Bahnhofstrasse was already bustling with shoppers at lunchtime, as is usual in the run-up to Christmas, there were not yet many shopping bags to be seen.

The clothing and shoe stores in particular were rather empty. There were only a few customers there, although almost all stores were advertising Black Friday offers and discounts. The department stores and Europaallee were quite busy, but there were still no queues at the checkouts. Most visitors just seemed to be on the lookout for offers without making a direct purchase.

+ Switzerland’s priciest street makes room for a bakery shop

Only the Apple store on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse was very busy. However, Apple was not explicitly advertising Black Friday, but was only running a voucher promotion over the weekend. There are no special Black Friday offers there, an employee said when asked.

Shoppi Tivoli in Spreitenbach, on the other hand, is expecting an increased number of visitors this Friday, which will be roughly on a par with a normal Saturday, according to an inquiry. Other major retailers and shopping centres have not yet commented on the start of Black Friday.

+ Young Swiss make the most of Black Friday offers

Meanwhile, it is still too early for a definitive assessment. Discount campaigns often continue over the weekend, which is why the Shoppi is expecting significantly more visitors on Saturday. In addition, online retailers traditionally entice shoppers with special offers on Cyber Monday, which is why many customers are shifting their shopping online.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].