Why must a sandwich in the City be so dear?

PRICE rises at Pret have been the subject of much City chatter as workers have returned to their desks after the summer holidays. While it might once have been possible to grab a lunch of a sandwich, drink and snack for under a fiver, now it is increasingly hard to get much change from a tenner.

- Simon Hunt

Such is the popularity of the sandwich firm with workers in the Square Mile - it has around 40 outlets, many just a few yards from each other that since the outbreak of Covid, footfall at its stores has been used by the Office for National Statistics as a barometer for the rate at which staff have ditched working from home for a return to the City.

Data released by the Financial Times earlier this month showed Pret's sandwich prices had risen by as much as 90% compared with 2020, significantly higher than the rate of food inflation.

But are these price hikes fair? The data used- scraped from historical websites using the WayBack machine was from Pret's online menu. But price rises for online orders have been much steeper than those in its stores. For example, its egg sandwich, which rose some 91% in price between 2020 and 2023 online, only rose 72% in-store, according to a dataset supplied to the Standard by Pret, while its tuna baguette, up 67% online, is only up 42% in-store.