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.
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