UK Edition
I don’t know what it says about the state of my life that I immediately noticed that Pret A Manger had raised the price of a butter croissant by 40p – from £2.20 to £2.60. But notice it I did – and enraged I was.
At one time, office dashes to Pret were a welcome respite from the day job. I’d typically go twice a day, ostensibly because I was too lazy to make coffee at home and I haven’t opened my thermal flask in a while so I’m scared of what it might smell like.
It was for this reason I started stumping up £25 a month for the Pret subscription. For the uninitiated, the Pret sub gets you five hot drinks a day, which is frankly insane. No-one drinks that many hot drinks, much less has the time to do so. But even if you were to only have a £3.30 latte every weekday of a month, you would have saved £47.60.
Not a terrible deal, right? Wrong. Pret coffee is decidedly mid, which is to be expected given they’re being knocked out by beleaguered station staff at a rate of around one flat white a minute. But the food is where they get you. I’m sorry but £2.20 for a croissant is a joke, never mind £2.60. A sausage and egg roll is £4.50. These are not serious people.
If you buy eight food items a month, the Pret subscription throws you the occasional bone in the form of a freebie. So after the free pastry you get for staying latched onto your subscription at the start of every month, you’re met with a barrage of fruit and nut bars that no-one likes and I imagine barely anyone bothered with.
But it’s okay everyone – because now the Pret sub (soon to be £30 a month) will come with a 10pc discount on food items. Why aren’t you clapping?
The maths-minded among you will have already picked up that this 10pc discount doesn’t even undo the price rises Pret conveniently whacked on most of its menu the week before the announcement. That croissant now costs a subscriber £2.34. For context, the far superior Sainsbury’s croissant is 85p. We are being ripped off here.
And look, I get it. Inflation has been a nightmare for the industry. Food prices have to go up because of soaring wholesale energy costs. Coffee is expensive to make and to export. I know this – I watched that stupid Jeremy Hunt video (below) with the flat white cups. But let’s be real with ourselves: convenience is not worth £30 a month.
The Pret subscription was a novel idea at a time when the takeaway coffee industry was on its knees during the pandemic, which essentially invalidated the entire business model as office workers shut themselves at home. In exchange for keeping fickle customers out of Nero and Starbucks, the chain risked massive losses if, say, everyone took advantage of the 150 free drinks a month they were entitled to.
That £25 a month might have saved Pret from catastrophe, and we have our monotonous high streets to prove it.
But is it really necessary now? I’d argue not. If anything, being a subscriber has nearly doubled my caffeine intake, because in order to maximise its use I invariably neck two coffees a day.
It’s not like they’re the most affordable route anyway: capsule-based coffee machines and milk frothers aren’t very expensive any more and can produce a perfectly quaffable latte in a fraction of the time you’ll spend waiting for it in Pret.
Besides, my bank balance is already a graveyard of subscriptions. Netflix (£10.99 a month), Spotify (£9.99), gym membership (£26.99), Amazon Prime (£8.99) – the list goes on. Throw in other monthly burdens like Klarna and the rent, and it starts to feel like millennials are being hypnotised into paying for everything on a depressing drip feed.
Well, I’m done. No one needs five Americanos a day, much less a £2.34 croissant. As I type this I am cancelling my Pret subscription and, once I’m done, I’m washing that thermos flask.
How I fell out of love with Pret
The coffee chain's subscription model is pointless – no one needs five Americanos a day