Pret invests more than £9m in staff pay rises
From 1 April 2022, 8,000 UK Pret staff will see their pay increase from a baseline of £9.40-9.56, to up to £10.15 per hour, with more than 6,900 Team Members receiving at least £10 per hour.
The Mystery Shopper bonus, which is awarded to teams on top of their weekly pay for good service, will also increase by 25% to £1.25 per hour. According to Pret, 80% of staff receive the bonus on average each week.
It comes after Pret faced a backlash last summer after choosing to permanently reduce the Mystery Shopper bonus to 50p per hour, and also scrap paid staff breaks.
The uproar led to Pret reinstating the service bonus at the pre-pandemic £1 rate, but the removal of paid breaks was not reversed.
Pret, which set out plans in recent months to open 200 new UK sites in the next two years as part of an aim to double the size of its estate within five years, says it is in a position to make these latest changes to staff wages as a result of the impact of its transformation strategy since 2020 and the stronger position the business is now in.
Its coffee subscription, which launched in September 2020, is now used more than one million times each week in the UK, while its digital sales have grown since the relaunch of its online delivery programme 18 months ago.
More recently, despite the emergence of the Omicron Covid variant Pret says its business had demonstrated significant resilience over the past two months, and while in-shop sales have fallen, sales across other channels have performed strongly.
“We’ve got big ambitions for Pret’s future, and none of it would be possible without the hard work and commitment of our people,” says Pano Christou: CEO of Pret.
“We hope that this announcement goes some way to thanking them for everything they’ve done over the course of pandemic – no one deserves it more.”
