What’s with the new Pret?

Posted on 26th September, 2009 by

For some years I’ve been a regular at the Pret a Manger café in Kingston. Yes, it’s part-owned by MacDonalds, but it had comfortable seats, the coffee was nice enough, your coffee wasn’t made by someone who most likely had been handling the cheese and ham paninis (even if they used tongs), and being a regular I got the odd freebie. Then, just before Ramadan, they shut down for what they described as a “little nip and tuck”. When I went in there last Sunday, I was shocked by what the place had become.

What’s changed? The price has gone up by 20p for a cup of coffee to drink in, something I’ve been told has not happened at any Pret where there has been no re-fit. The place looks like an industrial kitchen, with lots of shiny metal surfaces and a half-complete ceiling (what is quite so stylish about clearly visible ventilators and pipes?). And the seats! They are now a mixture of hard wooden seats of the sort you might find in a school classroom that become rickety and unstable, if they aren’t already, hard plastic seats, and armchair-effect plastic seats with a thin padding. There is also a big open area, the better for people to stand and queue, although it seems that the place is much emptier than it used to be.

The old place was, as I said before, comfortable and you could often get a degree of privacy if you came at the right time, with a big round table and an armchair; the dark colours of the upholstery — black, brown and red — contributed to this. If you didn’t, you were lucky to get a seat. It seems that the management are more interested in promoting their take-away offerings and not letting the customers get their feet under the table, hence the take-away prices are the same while the drink-in prices have gone up; meanwhile, Costa charges 15p less for roughly the same size, and 15p more for a cup that’s nearly double their regular size, and the dark, cosy interior still seems to work for them. And I get the impression that the coffee cups are now smaller, while the tendency to make you a “caffe latte” of which a quarter is froth has remained the same.

I could fill in a complaint form, but they are hardly going to put all the old decor back in just to suit me. Looks like I will just have to vote with my feet and put them under someone else’s table.

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  • http://oyhabibti.wordpress.com sabiwabi

    I have to say, you’ve touched on a big pet peeve of mine. I hate it when my favorite coffee shops, cafes, restaurants remodel for no good, apparent reason. It always seems to happen that way, you find a nice little niche somewhere and then BAM, they destroy it. So unfair. Look at it this way, at least you can hold your head up high again for NOT supporting a Mickey D’s establishment. LOL.

  • Omar

    Salam,

    I agree completely. Let’s hope it’s not a sign of things to come. Can I recommend “AMT Coffee”? Besides Pret they’re the only chain where all coffee is Fairtrade (in addition it’s organic) … in fact most of their stuff is fairtrade and they’re impressively passionate about that. Crucially, it’s the only other chain where you can get a decent coffee and not the stuff they somehow get away with serving at starbucks/cost/nero.

    As for decoration directions, yes, sad but part of a greater trend in design, architecture in general… Prince Charles needs to sort em out I think.

  • M Risbrook

    The place looks like an industrial kitchen, with lots of shiny metal surfaces and a half-complete ceiling (what is quite so stylish about clearly visible ventilators and pipes?).

    I’m sure the industrial look comes into fashion during times of a recession. The stations on the Jubilee line extension were designed during the early 1990s by architects inspired by the Scrap Brain Zone out of Sonic the Hedgehog.

  • http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/ Indigo Jo

    Salam Omar, there isn’t an AMT in Kingston - there used to be one at the train station, but they seem to have closed down. There is one in Richmond, though. I gave up on the train station AMT coffee when they introduced paninis, more out of anger than to avoid possible contamination.

  • http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/ Indigo Jo

    M Risbrook: they more reminded me of a Star Trek set (I hate Star Trek, or Star Dreck as I call it, because I found its premise of a community isolated on a space-ship light years from home quite uncomfortable, and it was often on during dinner-time when I was a child). But yeah, I get what you mean.

  • Thersites

    Have you never heard of kettles, coffee pots or tea pots- depending on your taste in hot drinks- and vacuum flasks if you’re going out? You can make your own sandwiches to suit in less than five minutes a lot cheaper and with better ingredients than Pret-a-Ripoff and friends.

  • Dean Saunders

    Pret and macdonalds was yesteryear….

  • http://dictatorprincess.wordpress.com DP

    Salam alaikoum I have to say I am slightly inclined to agree with Thersites about drinks (since I didnt see you mention food). I am a tea drinker and since I am kind of picky about my tea, and since Americans are champions of the go-mug, I almost always have my vacuum flask of tea on me. I get made fun of here in Switzerland but everyone back home has a mug. The only thing that kinda sucks is that sometimes you want to go to a coffee shop to sit down or just be somewhere besides home, work or outside- the “third place” as Starbucks so affectionally calls it, and to do that you generally have to buy coffee :)

  • Thersites

    “I am a tea drinker and since I am kind of picky about my tea,” Then you certainly wouldn’t want anything to do with P-a-P etc. Their idea of making tea is: take one cup, one teabag and hot water.Put teabag and water in cup and you’ve made a cup of tea.

  • jc22

    Hi, just to clarify, Mcdonald’s has not been part of Pret for 18 months. They now own a total of 0% in Pret and, even when they did own a percentage, they had no say over the quality and production of its food.

  • Old Pickler

    Pret a Ripoff is right. The sandwiches are hugely overpriced - and they’re rubbish.