Salaries are high and daycare is expensive deliberately, or so I've heard. It's a cultural decision - they want women to stay at home with the children and raise them, so the salaries are calibrated to be high enough for a nuclear family. That's why you get things like schools sending children home at lunchtime or on Wednesday afternoons: the school schedules are deliberately set up to be incompatible with working hours, in order to reinforce traditional family setups.

Food is expensive in Switzerland partly because it imports a lot and the surrounding countries know that the Swiss are rich and thus not very price sensitive. I read somewhere that exactly the same kilo of parma ham that costs 10 EUR in Italy can cost 50 EUR in Switzerland simply due to being charged different amounts by the supplier. This is not helped by the fact that the domestic supermarkets have what amounts to a duopoly between Co-op and Migros, with other brands like Denner being owned by one of the big two. There's little price competition.

GDP is a disastrous statistic almost everywhere, not just in Switzerland. Politicians single minded focus on it is a classic case of "what you can't measure you can't manage" being harmful. The biggest problem is that GDP is trivially pumped by government borrowing and spending, hence the endless circular arguments in Europe about austerity and whether governments should try to spend their way to growth. It doesn't work - governments ideas for productive investments rarely go beyond roads and railways - but it can appear to work in the short run as spending splurges feed directly into the GDP.