Pret is the worst – but the lunchtime juggernaut is too big to stop now

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It doesn’t occur typically. I’m not happy with it. The final time it occurred was actually nothing greater than an accident, a fluke. There have been no different outlets round, and I used to be deeply hungover after a slew of fairly chaotic Christmas events. There was nothing else for it: I needed to go to Pret. All I needed, Your Honour, was a can of Coke Zero. For some cause, this value £1.85, a truth my thoughts didn’t register till I went to faucet my telephone to pay. I seemed on the Pret cashier. The Pret cashier checked out me. “You may’t be critical,” I stated. “I do know,” he stated. It was the unhappy denouement to a yr of falling out of affection with Pret.

I’m not alone in my determination to interrupt up with Pret. Each different week a viral tweet will point us in shock and horror to a sad baguette or an overpriced salad; a lot in order that “Pretposting” has turn into a style of its personal. Final month, meals author Tom Parker-Bowles wrote about how the as soon as beloved chain had turn into unaffordable and unappealing to even essentially the most hardened, palette-challenged metropolis bankers. Cheese and pickle baguettes value upwards of £7.15, egg mayo sarnies have shot up – on the time of writing, and presumably it will likely be worse now – by a frankly Kafkaesque 72 per cent since August 2020, and there’s nonetheless that obligatory “dine in” surcharge: a 20 per cent VAT for the pleasure of gazing a maroon sea of ripped off commuters consuming unhappy mac and cheeses. Inexperienced juice, bizarrely, is a fiver.

“Pret used to supply worth and high quality,” writes Parker-Bowles. “Now, it does neither. What was as soon as the hero of the excessive road is in peril of turning into a sandwich basket case.”

It wasn’t at all times like this. Pret A Manger was as soon as a PR darling, a 40-year-old bastion of British lunch hour tradition, second solely to the common-or-garden Tesco meal deal. Throughout the pandemic, their five-coffee-a-day subscription service grew to become unexpectedly fashionable, presumably as a result of individuals had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do besides stroll round, six toes aside, carrying desultory takeaway coffees. However then the world pivoted on its axis once more; the WFH utopia ended and we funnelled ourselves again into workplaces. Subscription companies additionally rose in worth throughout the board and instantly each chain, model and repair was competing towards the value of commuting usually, dwelling usually and socialising usually once more. In fact, the Pret subscription had thrived when all it needed to compete with was portray by numbers and bathroom roll stockpiling.

And now, three years on, even Pret’s hero product, that pandemic love story, their month-to-month subscription service, can’t save them. Though “little deal with” tradition continues to be thriving, Pret hardly seems like a deal with. It’s too ubiquitous, and it could’t match the delights of an artisan matcha or boba tea. This yr the chain introduced a leap in its subscription worth of 20 per cent, rising from £25 to £30 a month – whereas including a paltry 10 per cent low cost on all meals to the present espresso deal. The worth bump accounted for, in accordance with Pret’s apologetic reasoning, an additional £1 to cowl ingredient costs, £2 to cowl workers wages and £2 to cowl power prices, allegedly. The Instances referred to as that logic “a joke”.

Maybe we’re all being a bit of harsh on Pret, although. In spite of everything, in a yr dominated by inflation and a spiralling value of dwelling disaster, it’s true that all the things prices extra, on a regular basis. However the issue individuals have with Pret’s pricing, and with Pret typically, is that even after they do break down their choices in an try at transparency, it comes throughout as inauthentic. We as customers appear to be making a distinction, each time we trudge into that burgundy pit of horrible baguettes: there’s inflation, after which there’s Pret pricing. Earlier this yr, the Monetary Instances even gave the observe the doubtful honour of its personal newly minted time period; they referred to as it “hyper-pretflation”. Each time the chain sneakily provides an additional 5p to the price of these aforementioned horrible baguettes they get one step nearer to cementing their popularity because the UK excessive road’s equal to the Weimar Republic.

Pret is valiantly trying to carry again the tide of that PR backlash. In September, Man Meakin, the chain’s outlets and franchise director, defended its worth hikes after being accused – unsurprisingly – of rampant profiteering throughout the price of dwelling disaster by each The Instances and The Solar. “Costs are going up”, he stated, “so sadly we’re having to go our costs via to clients every so often.” He spoke of the must be each “conscious” and “aggressive” on the identical time. “Now we have extra worth factors than we’ve ever had due to our several types of codecs, and we have to maintain ourselves to account on that.”

As a press release, it’s the equal of an apologetic, half-arsed shrug. It felt significantly unconvincing, too, on condition that 2023 was the primary yr Pret introduced earnings since 2018. These numbers weren’t precisely negligible both; gross earnings, in truth, have been up 83 per cent (The Instances reported even larger, at 89 per cent). To reiterate, the value of an egg mayo sandwich – the saddest of all of the sandwich universe – is up 72 per cent since 2020, in comparison with CPI inflation of 20 per cent over the identical interval.

However whereas the chilly onerous numbers don’t lie, the destructive PR continues to flow into. After a yr of combating again on profiteering claims, previously month, they’ve discovered themselves the centre of an ongoing boycott of Israeli items amid the nation’s ongoing warfare towards Hamas and army bombardment of Gaza. Branded “Pret A-Partheid”, the chain was criticised for its plans to open greater than 40 branches throughout Israel within the subsequent decade. Maybe correctly, given the lacklustre response Meakin had on the comparatively uncontroversial matter of worth hikes, Pret have but to answer the boycott, nevertheless it’s a grim finish to a grim yr, one wherein, wherever you stand, we’ve fallen out of affection.

However does it actually matter that we have now? No matter Pret’s political affiliations – can a latte have a political affiliation? Is that this model my good friend? – and no matter ridiculous heights their costs attain, the unhappy truth is that comfort is king to us, the lazy, frazzled, hungover commuter class. There’ll at all times be an event the place Pret is what’s closest and best. It typically feels, strolling down any British excessive road, that there are extra Prets than there are individuals.

More and more, Pret A Manger looks as if a juggernaut that’s too large to fail. Pret simply rolled out their subscription service in France. They wish to “speed up their US enlargement”. Northern Eire’s first Pret opened this month. They shouldn’t have bothered. The unhappy actuality could possibly be that the inexorable pressure of Pret A Manger won’t ever go away, nonetheless a lot we secretly resent it. Pret will stay blanketed throughout our cities and cities, a mahogany nightmare of egg mayos costing upwards of £30, and we’ll all merely settle for it, as a result of who may be bothered to stroll eight minutes down the street for a Tesco meal deal that now prices £4 slightly than £3? We are able to hate it however we are able to’t escape it. It’s Pret’s world now; we simply reside in it.