An hour into a walking tour of Pret A Manger’s shops in central London, Pano Christou stops in his tracks. His face darkens. It’s 1.30pm and an engineer is fiddling with a big silver fridge bang in the middle of the busy shop floor in Pret on Piccadilly.
Christou, the chief executive of the chain, is perplexed. This is Pret’s rush hour, when it hopes to shift hundreds of sandwiches to office workers. But the crowds are being forced to squeeze around the metal box. “What they shouldn’t be doing is trying to repair this at lunchtime,” Christou complains.
The shop manager appears and is politely admonished. “Did they have to fix it now?” Christou asks, before suggesting the engineer comes back later.
A fridge in the middle of the shop is small fry compared to the problems Christou has been forced to navigate over the past two years. Sales plunged in the depths of the pandemic and thousands of staff were laid off. It was a fight for survival. The chain stayed afloat thanks only to £285 million pumped into the business by its shareholder, JAB Holdings, and co-founder Sinclair Beecham.
Sunday Times. To read the full interview, click here
