Pret is the worst – but the lunchtime juggernaut is too big to stop now
It doesn’t happen often. I’m not proud of it. The last time it happened was really nothing more than an accident, a fluke. There were no other shops around, and I was deeply hungover after a slew of reasonably chaotic Christmas parties. There was nothing else for it: I had to go to Pret. All I wanted, Your Honour, was a can of Coke Zero. For some reason, this cost £1.85, a fact my mind didn’t register until I went to tap my phone to pay. I looked at the Pret cashier. The Pret cashier looked at me. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “I know,” he said. It was the sad denouement to a year of falling out of love with Pret.
I’m not; so much so that “Pretposting” has become a genre of its own. Last month, food writer wrote about how the once beloved chain had become unaffordable and unappealing to even the most hardened, palette-challenged city bankers. Cheese and pickle baguettes cost upwards of £7.15, egg mayo sarnies have shot up – at the time of writing, and presumably it will be worse now – by a frankly Kafkaesque 72 per cent since August 2020, and there’s still that compulsory “dine in” surcharge: a 20 per cent VAT for the pleasure of staring at a maroon sea of ripped off commuters eating sad mac and cheeses. Green juice, bizarrely, is a fiver.
