It is 2089. My grandson tugs at the hem of my musty corduroy trousers. ‘Pop-pop,’ he says. ‘Were you alive during the Great Pret Pickle Shortage of 2026?’ There is an almighty crash of thunder. A gust of wind throws open a window. A scream can be heard from outside. I look down at my hands, which are visibly shaking, and compose myself. ‘I was there,’ I whisper. ‘I was there when Pret lost the jambon beurre. Man and sandwich were never the same again.’
I’m being facetious, of course. I couldn’t care less about Pret A Manger’s ham, pickle and butter roll going MIA. The coffee giant claims the sandwich has gone missing due to a temporary cornichon (pickle) shortage – much to the dismay, we’re told, of its loyal, city banker target market. I’ve eaten the fist-sized jambon beurre all of three times in my life and never with conviction, so I won’t be losing any sleep.
That said, the jambon beurre’s absence highlights a wider problem: the sorry state of the British high street café. I’m not here to get into a debate about coffee. Coffee is subjective, and customers are loyal to their coffee houses, however misplaced that loyalty may be. But the problem isn’t just the coffee. It’s the food, it’s the ambience, it’s the price (high street coffee prices rose by 30 per cent between 2021 and 2024) – it’s the whole painstaking ordeal. And Pret is a prime example of where it’s all gone wrong.
While Pret coffee tastes like the beans were mixed with the remnants of a cremated sandbox, its food and quick service have kept customers coming back since its inception in 1986 – until now. For years, I was a champion of the Pret prosciutto baguette. I ate that sandwich three times a week for two years. Why? Because it was under a fiver and tasted far better than an anaemic ham and cheese sandwich from Tesco.
But have you visited a Pret recently? It’s like meeting up with an old friend who’s let themselves go. Each visit is a masterclass in disappointment. Search for the sandwich you want. They don’t have it. Settle for the next best thing. Join the conga line of City dweebs earning £80,000 a year to send emails like: ‘Hey Vicky! Hope you had a lovely Easter! I just wanted to touch base before we jump on a Teams call later!’ Order a coffee and watch the barista struggle to press the button on the glorified self-service machine. Get handed the wrong order. Sit down on a filthy table covered in meatball sauce and the detritus of a ‘five berry’ granola bowl. Bite into your £6.25 sandwich and roll the dice: will it crack a tooth or will it turn into a mushy ball of goop that slides down your throat? Go back to the office with bits of olive tapenade and basil between your teeth and do it all again tomorrow.
Have you visited a Pret recently? It’s like meeting up with an old friend who’s let themselves go
But where else are you going to go? Pret is hardly an outlier. All the major coffee chains have their drawbacks. Caffè Nero had its heyday in the mid-noughties and has since taken the definition of a sandwich and removed the crucial criterion of ‘filling’. Costa Coffee (now owned by Coca-Cola and inexplicably the largest coffee chain in the UK) serves a croque monsieur that would have Charles de Gaulle turning in his grave. Joe & The Juice is for the erstwhile cast of Made in Chelsea and those who think gymwear is appropriate outside of the gym. Gail’s might make a decent sandwich but its portion sizes exclude anyone larger than Jiminy Cricket, and its prices will have you kneecapped by a loan shark before the week’s finished.
Starbucks, which closed ten of its UK branches in October last year, is perhaps the saddest of them all. The Seattle-born multinational coffee chain has experienced an Icarus-like fall from grace over the past decade. Ordering from Starbucks was once a status symbol. Frappuccinos, pumpkin spice lattes and cake pops had millennials in a chokehold. But, somewhere along the way, Starbucks fell off its cultural perch. Today, its coffee shops have become the glorified waiting rooms of Britain’s liminal spaces: train stations, airports, derelict shopping centres and Torbay Hospital. The ‘London creative’ no longer drinks a Venti at Starbies. Instead, he settles down at a coffee shop-cum-natural wine bar on Bermondsey Street to drink a cortado and write 15,000 words of derivative tripe.
This brings us to another problem: the proliferation of faux-independent coffee houses. Blank Street, Black Sheep Coffee and Watchhouse are to independent coffee shops what grey squirrels are to their red cousins: harbingers of death. These chains are dressed up to look community-oriented, but they are just as soulless as the coffee conglomerates next door. And, crucially, they impinge on smaller businesses struggling to stay afloat.
So what do we really want from the British high street café? We want coffee that isn’t burnt. We want baristas trained to do more than press a button. We want sandwiches that don’t break your bank (or teeth). We want coffee shops that feel like genuine ‘third spaces’ (and I don’t mean an affected east London-inspired co-working space). In short, we want cafés to try a little harder. It’s about time Pret et al wake up, smell the coffee and get their acts together.
Comments