Can you imagine how great it must have felt to be a Pret a Manger executive in late 2019? There was a Pret restaurant. They’d just bought Eat and its 94 stores. Veggie Pret was taking over the south east. London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart said Pret was his favourite pub. There was a Twitter account called Pret L’Etranger where visits to Pret were written in the style of Albert Camus. They started selling lobster rolls.
That starts with getting rid of 90 per cent of the rubbish sandwiches
Pret bigwigs were Masters of the Universe. But then Covid, then lockdown, and disaster. Revenue in 2020 dropped by £299 million. Their survival plan was to beg: for £20 a month, you could get five drinks a day (it later went up to £30). I was really excited, and my friends were really excited. For about a week I was drinking smoothies as a grown man, and finding it hard to sleep from all the caffeine.
And then I stopped. Four years later, the subscription scheme has too. Pret’s managing director Clare Cough has said yesterday that the offer ‘almost seemed too good to be true’. That’s wrong: it was never a good offer. It was always a little bit gross. Pret coffee is really a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation, for train stations and hospital visits only. I can’t quite say it’s the worst coffee I’ve ever drunk, because it doesn’t really taste like coffee. It does have an amazing consistency though. It’s the exact same alchemy of muck across all 697 outlets.
But the idea of shuttling from home to Pret to the office then back to Pret then back to the office then back to Pret then back to the office then back to Pret then back to the office then back to Pret for something on the way home: well, that’s no way to live.
The end of the subscription is proof that Pret’s still in a rut. There’s been plenty of newspaper articles about what’s gone wrong, culprits ranging from staff emigrating after Brexit, to the mile-high prices and also the declining cleaning standards. The shops used to have a strategy called the ‘Pret buzz’: staff were encouraged to serve you with a smile. Now, it’s a Pret yell.
So, what’s to be done? Pret executives have a dilemma – do they make their products cheaper, and try to compete with the Tesco meal deals, or do they go expensive, and clip the wings of the ascendant Gail’s?
They should do neither. Instead, they should recognise that Pret has been successful not because it is good, but because it is certain. It is a pharmacy, not a shop. It sells drugs (caffeine) and sustenance (sandwiches). Therefore, it should think a bit irreverently, open every shop from 6 a.m. until midnight, and think what people need, rather than what they want.
That starts with getting rid of 90 per cent of the rubbish sandwiches and making sure there are thousands of the few good ones. How many people have walked into a Pret specifically for the chicken caesar and bacon baguette, then immediately left because it’s run out? Frankly, I don’t give a damn if you’re ‘launching’ a ‘New York bloomer on rye’. I want the thing I had in 2015, back when you were the only edible chain on the high street, and I want it to be there when I’m there.
That’s the trick, focusing on quantity and need rather than quality. It should only sell things people are desperate for. So, no, it shouldn’t quite sell post-it notes and envelopes, but it should start selling lighters, vapes and fags, and maybe scratchcards too. From 6 p.m., they should unsheathe the doner kebab.
Pret should also recognise that its secondary importance is for charging phones, wifi and the loo, rather than any of its food. So install seas of plug sockets and beds so people can have a rest downstairs and upstairs, so that customers look like polio victims laid out in banks of iron lungs. Put in the long urinals that they have at football stadiums, and make sure that anyone using them without buying a Coke Zero gets cattle-prodded.
Silly? Perhaps. But surely something drastic is better than malaise. Catering exclusively for desperation is the sensible strategy. Executives need people to be saying words that have not been heard in this country for years. ‘Thank God there’s a Pret’.
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