The picture was taken before the museum tour!
A day before my birthday we visited the Lindt Chocolate Museum in Zurich. It opened its door to the world during the pandemic in the fall of 2020. According to them, it is the BIGGEST chocolate museum in the entire world.
As you can imagine our expectations were high. Switzerland
stands for high quality. And chocolate is next to the Swiss watch and smelly Swiss cheese
the most famous Swiss export worldwide.
The location is beautiful because it is on Zurich Lake. The
modern building is right next to the chocolate factory with a long history by
its founders and their sweet-bitter life stories and legacy.
As you can imagine this new attraction is a tourist magnet
for international visitors from all over the world. The huge entrance in white
is welcoming and the fake chocolate fountain in the middle of a huge and empty
space is eye-catching and promising. We were very curious to go inside the
museum and see the history of chocolate and its production.
What shocked us though is the lack of friendliness by the
staff at the front desk. What was also surprising is the lack of security and
staff numbers in general. The only friendly people are the toilet-cleaning ladies. At least they have a friendly smile on their face.
You can easily walk inside the building without security control
and leave your handbag and jacket in a locked closet like a train station and no
one is there to check and make sure that whatever you put there is ok and not
dangerous.
It is advised to get your tickets online in advance because of
the high number of daily visitors. The museum tour takes around 30 minutes. Once
you enter the tour by scanning your ticket you are in a green plantation of
chocolate beans and you see on screens where they get their beans from and how
it is hand-picked by low-paid workers far away. You see videos of poor people
working day and night for little money compared to what the chocolate
factories make. And as we all know they make a fortune.
Then you move on to other rooms with no atmosphere. Actually
quite boring and I wouldn’t recommend it for children at all. The only little highlight
is a room with four fountains from which you can try a little bit of chocolate.
We were expecting to get a look behind the scene of the fabric but all you see
is the process with machines behind a glassed window with no staff or anything.
Very technical and boring. You could easily watch the staged production like a
showroom on TV. One would expect to smell chocolate all over the building but
you smell nothing. One would expect to hear a beautiful sound of music, but
nothing but silence. One would expect to see lots of colors and joyful chocolate figures
for kids, but nothing. BORING, BORING, BORING!
The only highlight of this museum is the fake chocolate
fountain in the entrance hall and the souvenir shop. We also wouldn’t recommend the coffee shop because, like the front desk, the staff is not friendly and welcoming. You expect to see happy and smiling faces
but all you get is annoyed and grumpy people.
As if all of that was not enough we also made a negative experience
at the front desk. We had an extra ticket that I wanted to give it away to a kid.
The woman said I can re-sell the ticket if I want. But I said no, I want to make a kid
happy. She said I could wait until someone comes to buy a ticket, which we did.
The 12-year-old boy was so happy and grateful. I gave the ticket to his mother
and we said goodbye because we had to start our museum visit. When we came out
we saw the mother and son in the shop and we asked if they have been inside. The mother
said, no the lady at the front desk didn’t accept your ticket and said it is a
used voucher. Imagine our surprise. So we went back to the front desk and I said
how come you didn’t accept my ticket? She was not expecting to see us again
and didn’t know what to say. She made stupid excuses about the system but in
the end, she was forced to refund the money to the lady and accept our valid
ticket.
Takeaway from the museum day: Don’t allow anyone to toy with
you like YoYo & Chess. I guess that was a good lesson for this woman at the front desk not to
muck around with visitors, just because you believe everyone is a tourist! Don’t mess up with
Lily Amis!!!!
We don't recommend a visit to this museum not to adults and surely not to kids. It is much better to spend your time on Zurich Lake and have nice ice cream than to waste it in this unwelcoming and unfriendly money-making machine museum!!!
OUR HONEST REVIEW: We only give 1 from 5 stars!
BTW: I was about to write a complaint letter to HR and during my online research I read employee's complaints about the company's treatment of female workers and the working atmosphere in general which sounds awful. No wonder, we felt what we felt. As one ex-employee said, the company's image from the outside is WOW thanks to its products but from the inside, it is ugh!!! I've decided not to waste my time on a letter to a company that doesn't take sexual harassment in working place seriously and has hundreds of negative reviews online and isn't doing anything about it!
The picture was taken before the museum tour!
