First indicators showed that retailers experienced a positive Christmas season.[1] In this blog, we want to have a closer look at expenditures during the Christmas season and quantify the difference in spending compared to previous years. For this purpose, we use card expenditure data provided by Worldline Schweiz AG. In particular, we use the real… Read More Higher expenditures during the Christmas season in 2025 than in 2024
Black Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Data from Monitoring Consumption Switzerland in the merchant category Retail: Other Goods reveals that sales in the Black Friday week increased by an impressive 49% relative to the previous week, reaching the highest weekly turnover for this year. On Black Friday itself, November 28, sales… Read More Retail Spending Spiked Again on Black Friday—Yet Turnover Fell Below 2024 Levels on Black Friday Itself and in the Black-Friday Week
The UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 in Switzerland brought us great football, packed stadiums, and an incredible atmosphere across the country. Besides leaving lasting memories, the tournament might also give a boost to the Swiss economy. While long-term effects of such an event are generally hard to measure, we can estimate the effects on the Swiss… Read More British Fans Score Big for St. Gallen Restaurants
2025 has been a turbulent year so far. On April 2, 2025, the US president announced Liberation Day, promising import tariff increases for many trading partners. The announcement and the resulting rise in economic uncertainty has been associated with a large decline of economic activity in Switzerland and beyond. In this blog, we try to… Read More Resilient Retail Spending: Tracking Swiss Consumer Spending After Trump’s Trade Shift
28. May 2025 A large literature has analyzed the determinants of urban growth and urban decline. Recent policy measures of the city of St.Gallen targeting the costs of parking and the availability of parking spaces have sparked a public debate in which rising parking costs and limited availability of parking spaces have been linked to… Read More Urban decline due to parking costs? Do the costs and availability of parking spaces impact expenditures in retail stores and restaurants in inner cities?
28. May 2025 The song wasted love of the Austrian singer JJ won the Eurovision song contest, which took place on May 10-17, 2025, in Basel. The event was expected to generate CHF 60 million in value added. The day after the event, the city of Basel declared the ESC a big success. In this… Read More Wasted love but no wasted money? The effect of the Eurovision song contest on local spending
11. February 2025 After the holiday season, some people return gifts which they have received.[1] Using electronic payment data, we want to find out how pronounced the refunds are across different expenditure categories and how large the differences are in January (when more returned items are likely to have been gifts) relative to the rest… Read More Does the January gift hangover become smaller? Refunds across time, category, and transaction channel
2. December 2024 Black Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Data from Monitoring Consumption Switzerland in the merchant category Retail: Other Goods reveals that sales in the Black Friday week increased by an impressive 55% relative to the previous week, reaching the highest weekly turnover for this year. On Black Friday itself,… Read More Spreading out the spending: Retail spending surges by 5.2% year-on-year during the Black-Friday week, with less spending concentrated on the Black Friday itself
09. July 2024 Large events such as the EURO 2024 football tournament obtain sufficient attention so that they affect expenditure patterns, particularly on match days. We use expenditure data from Monitoring Consumption Switzerland (MCS) in the category food & beverage services in Switzerland to quantify the size of this effect. Figure 1: Year-on-Year expenditure growth… Read More Match days of the Swiss national team during the EURO 2024: a mixed blessing for bars and restaurants
20. May 2024 On August 10, 2023 an accident caused the closure of the Gotthard base tunnel, a key connection for travel between the North of Switzerland and the canton Ticino. The closure lasted until December 10, 2023. Thereafter, a reduced schedule of 31 trains per weekend was implemented. Since March 2024 further 7 trains… Read More The closure of the Gotthard base tunnel had only a temporary negative effect on the growth of expenditures for hotels and restaurants in Ticino
