Every outlet on Fleet Street seems to have had its say over the price hikes at Pret A Manger in recent months: the Standard, Telegraph, FT, Bloomberg…take your pick. If Pret was looking to reassure its members that it’s keeping prices low, today’s announcement may well have gone down like a cup of cold macchiato.
The sandwich chain said today it would undertake a major overhaul of its Club Pret coffee subscription scheme. From September, the subscription price will go down from £30 to £5 – but instead of getting five free daily coffees, members will now only get them half price.
Is this a saving for members? The short answer is it depends how much you like coffee. Spy has crunched the numbers based on the Pret down the road from Standard towers. It turns out if you’re a true caffeine addict and are using up all five free coffees daily, ordering cappuccinos, the new scheme would cost you an eye-watering £260 more per month, or more than £3,000 extra per year. Ouch.
Of course, even the most dedicated Pret fans are unlikely to visit its stores that often. But even if they drank one coffee a day, the monthly cost will still more than double to £67. Indeed, only if you drink fewer than one coffee every two and a half days are you making a saving – not nearly enough to sate Spy’s fix.
