My wife and were walking through town the other day and we noticed that in every shop display window there were advertisements in English; names such as “On Sale”, “Free Delivery”, “Free Gift”, “We are Open”, “Malls & Shopping Centers”, “Two for One”, “Hot Wheels”, “Special Christmas”, “Sweatshirts”, “Must Haves”, “Electro Beauty”, “Going Out of Business Sale” etc. and many more, too many to mention!

When you purchase an electronic item online or a piece of furniture in Ikea, for example,  there is every possible language listed on that instruction page and when you go to the airport or the train station in Zürich all the signs are also in English all over the place!

God forbid you are sick and can’t read the instruction on your medicine package!

When we arrived home ( by the way she has a bad cold)  my wife reached for the five different packages of medicine, three of them she already had in our medicine cabinet, the other two she received earlier that morning by her doctor, now she trying to decide which of the five she should use, however, the only languages listed on all 5 of the packages were German, French and Italian.

Now it isn’t anyone fault or problem she doesn’t speak enough German to understand what it says, but in lieu of all the English written all over the cities, and everyone basically speaks some English in this country one would think the pharmaceutical companies would consider writing the instructions in English as well. Let’s assume I am a tourist, in the first half of 2018 the Swiss hotel industry recorded 18.4 million overnight stays in Switzerland! How many of those tourists you think went to a pharmacy during their stay in Switzerland, unless they speak one of the 3 languages listed they would have no clue what to do with their medicine. Most of these tourists are from Indonesia, China, England, and the North American continent.

And what about all the Immigrants and refugees,

most of them speak English, certainly not French, German, and Italian.

If any pharmaceutical executive should be reading this, which is very unlikely, or you know someone in that branch, tell them to spend another few euros on ink and add English to all of them over the counter and prescription drugs!

Three different drugs, two pages, back and front, full of instructions and information, but no space to add a few basic English instructions?