You can shop with him at the village shop at three o’clock in the morning.

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Guy Maradan (60) quit his job after working as a banker for 30 years at a financial institution. And now he’s doing something that not every bank would recommend: He now owns a village shop.

Maradan grew up in Cerniat in the canton of Friborg, a 400-person village in the Gruyere district, at 927 meters above sea level. The post office and the bank, even the school, have already left the village. Maradan founded a cooperative in 2018 to keep the business running, when the owner of the village shop also wanted to give up because the long working hours could no longer afford the costs. “I was born in Cerniat,” says Maradan. “I want to give something back to society.”

Village shops are important, even vital businesses in mountain villages. Not only does it provide basic foodstuffs to mountain people and tourists from the plain, it is also the only meeting place for conversation among locals in large settlements.

But shops are having a hard time: Customer and product range are manageable. And if there is a large distributor two villages away, customers regularly take the farther route in anticipation of lower prices and a wider selection.

Good ideas are in demand

“Village shops in mountainous areas are repeatedly forced to close for commercial reasons,” said a press release.

Thomas Egger, 55, Chairman of the Swiss Highlands Working Group (SAB), at a specialist conference in Bern on Thursday, to which SAB was invited together with Swiss Mountain Aid.

This is a vicious circle: if a village shop closes, the affected village loses its attractiveness. Locals move away, tourists stay away. For Egger, the key to preserving mountain shops lies in regional coordination, multifunctionality – for example, the integration of post offices into shops – and digitization.

Maradan completely relies on the latter. Eight kilometers from Bulle, the nearest centre, it does pioneering work. As Blick shows, customers can shop at its store 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Technology makes it possible

The store operates entirely digitally: customers have to look at a camera when they want to enter the store. If you’re a member of the store co-op, facial recognition will open the store’s door for you. Maradan can open the door to tourists from all over the world with a mobile phone. Payment is also made without staff: Customers scan goods and pay either directly in-store or by monthly statement. The latter is popular because Maradan offers 1.5 percent off sales there.

A lot of work is made easier for the store operator by managing the warehouse. If the customer buys 300 grams of Gruyere cheese, the system triggers a reorder of the cheese without the shopkeeper taking any action. According to Maradan, nothing was stolen. Maybe it’s because of the various cameras that record everything that happens in the store.

Important for village life

Maradan is particularly proud of the quality of its goods scanners. It is the same as Migros and Coop use. “The digitization project would not have been possible without the a-fonds-perdu payment of 56,000 francs from Berghilfe,” he says. Despite automatic payment and repeated orders: there is still someone in the store in the morning. “It’s important for older people. They want to be able to chat with someone,” says Maradan.

The former banker is now considering resigning as general manager and co-op president. “I’m done,” he explains. “It is also much easier to transfer a business thanks to the cooperative than to be a sole proprietorship.” Maraden still wants to keep the village shop for technology.

Source :Blick