How much?! Why it's time to break up with pricey Pret

The British public is falling out of love with Pret A Manger, writes Roisin Lanigan. Once an adored bastion of lunch-hour culture, the high street chain is suffocating under the weight of extortionate egg-mayo sarnies and overpriced lattes

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 alone in my decision to break up with Pret. Every other week a viral tweet will point us in shock and horror to a sad baguette or an overpriced salad; so much so that “Pretposting” has become a genre of its own. Last month, food writer Tom Parker-Bowles 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 percent since August 2020, and there’s still that compulsory “dine in” surcharge: a 20 percent 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.

“Pret used to offer value and quality,” writes Parker-Bowles. “Now, it does neither. What was once the hero of the high street is in danger of becoming a sandwich basket case.”