I came across a webinar on skills in companies featuring 3 companies including Pret.
A Pret Learning and Development manager was invited to give input. People can listen to it starting here.
My quick response, or trying to be brief, Pret A Manger do NOT focus on skill but on emotional labour. Pret know my blog, and one post I wrote a few years ago was after I read an interview with former HR director Andrea Wareham.
Also, the training in Pret is little to non-existent.
And what Pret did via former Development Manager Lila Warren and other higher leaders is the reason I work with the press etc.
What Pret’s Development manager Daksha Stancilas is claiming is typical for high paid Pret employees from head office. She says they “encourage” managers to have face-to-face conversation and seeing talent etc. In my 10 years in 30 shops and speaking with other Pret staff, this NEVER happens, and head office knows this.
The lip service of head office since YEARS is laughable in the least.
At around 33:20 of the webinar Daksha Stancilas says that in Pret it is “quite evident” that you need to have the skill to make a coffee, or you need to have a skill to make a sandwich.
First of all, you don’t need skill to make a coffee or sandwich in Pret, especially not while staff are NOT trained properly, but instead given “how-to-cards”, an iPad to read during their unpaid lunch breaks and are pushed to have a coffee ready within 60 seconds or no-one in the team gets bonus. This then leads to the manager to reprimand whoever was at “fault” for the whole team not to get bonus,and the team will use the silent treatment on the person at fault.
In the kitchen new staff have a brutal first week and are then thrown into the deep-end, as all Pret stores are by default understaffed to maximise profit. Pret has all the slogans, material etc. in place, but the reality is VERY very different.
Low wage frontline shop staff have to think of a gazillion things, especially smiling, chatting, pretending to be happy for 8, 10, 12 … hours every single day to exhaustion, all to appear buzzy and happy in a brutal low-wage heated stressful environment. In the meantime many suffer with mental health problems, alcoholism, depression etc.
I don’t know Daksha Stancilas, but what she is describing is the typical blah blah blah from Pret, which is far away from the reality of the shop floor and kitchens.
Staff are hardly trained and thrown into the deep-end and bullied if they don’t learn on their own via iPads on their FREE TIME! And when they do the quizzes to proceed, they are helped by the leaders and/or managers to quickly get it done, and then they don’t know what they’re doing.
She is right when she says that managers need more training in leadership. Pret, in fact, from my many years in hospitality, even before I worked at Pret, has THE WORST management style in hospitality that I’ve ever experienced. Pret have all the wording, slogans and literature, but they have a systemic bullying culture, wage theft (plenty of reports incl. Press reports), pay delays which after I sent it to the Guardian was publicly reported on, promotion via the bedroom where the shop manager coerce sex from young team members for promotion etc. etc.
And then we always wondered why management is so utterly bad, not to mention that the GOOD managers get burnt out and exploited. Regular overtime due to cutting labour, all this leads to poorer food quality, smaller portions, locked toilets to avoid cleaning them with no staff, dirty shops etc. etc.
Trustpilot reviews are through the roof on the poor quality. As of almost June 2026, 71% of reviews on Truspilot (1 & 2 stars combined) are fed up with Pret for a variety of reasons including a customer of 30 years having quit Pret.
Scroll down to the blue oval sign saying “See all xxxx reviews.
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Pret HQ staff as usual live in La La Land.
And even calling Pret’s head office “support centre” is another of the many brainwash wordings Pret use. This wording started around 2017. There is NO support! I got grievance hearings done because I persisted and pushed back on Pret’s aim to get rid of me once my brother died. HR is toxic and was part of the problem from the get go.
And as usual this Pret HQ staff making lofty claims at around 37:00, claiming that what Pret do really well is to “encourage” their managers to coach each other and for OPs managers to share their knowledge etc.
Sorry, but that’s a big pile of horse sh!t again. Shop General Managers (GMs) have no time to coach anyone let alone each other. It’s a cut-throat business where some managers even screw each other over to win in the quarterly “premiership” to compete for top shop and top 10 positions. And OPs managers sit at home or during lunch time in the pub, and mostly communicate via emails demanding targets to be reached.
Utter bullsh!t yet again from a privileged HQ staff rattling down the same old, same old slogans.
Bottom line, staff are NOT promoted according to their skill, they are exploited on their skill. And many managers don’t know what they’re doing, letting the skilled people do the hard work and the managers then take the credit for it, and don’t even pay up the wages when a Team Leader covers the manager role while the GM is on holiday. And promotion happen on a nepotism system, promoted are friends, those who slept with the managers, those who cheat to reach the unrealistic targets Pret set. And so on.
And at the Q&A regarding how Pret make sure employees clearly understand what skills they need to progress. Daksha Stancilas responds in a theoretical way that staff will know via their job description. Sounds good, but staff criss-cross all the time doing other jobs they are neither hired for nor trained in due to chronic lack of staffing shops. A very common thing is for a “coffee maker” to do barista work for months before even getting booked for training. And then after the training wait more months before they can “graduate” as a barista. This is done on purpose to avoid paying the higher wage.
She further talks about the expectations of staff to have to live Pret’s values and behaviours. How about Pret live these themselves, huh?
How about Pret stop stealing and delaying wages? How about Pret stop the ridiculous micromanaging and humiliating weekly mystery shopper scheme? How about Pret stop paying CEO Pano Cristou ridiculous annual wage and millions in bonus while staff pay is cut and wages stolen? And all the other dodgy things Pret do while wanting staff to live some values Pret don’t live by.
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Annual CEO bonus now in 2026 is at least £5 million and counting, plus year-on-year pay-rise.
“Pret CEO handed near-£4m bonus in year staff pay was cut.
Pano Christou also given 27% salary rise in 2021 as chain took more than £50m in government support”.
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And the TWO pay delays in 2022, which Pret did also in 2012 when I worked there, all under some dodgy payroll excuse. I was leaked this info and passed it on to Sarah Butler from The Guardian:
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Not to mention a third settlement in NY since 2018 for wage theft. Pret repay $1.2 million to thousands of staff. In the UK the legal system is not as helpful for workers, so hardly anyone goes to court here.
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Daksha Stancilas further says that new staff are not expected to be ready in week one. On paper she is right, in reality it is BRUTAL how new staff are pushed to know everything within a week! I and many others had to learn most on how own, including office stuff, and we were mainly pushed to work really fast and got reprimanded for the slightest mistakes. She says that staff are allowed time to learn and that they then can reflect with their managers. What a fncking joke! A horrible fairytale! If staff don’t learn fast they get fear managed by their managers and coerced to work overtime for free!
I will over and over say again and again that Pret need long-term undercover journalists to go into Pret to show how it really is. Amy Sharpe went in for too short, just one week in the evening shift where she couldn’t see the business happening like when she worked for a month in the morning.
And she calls the job in shops a little easier than in head office as there is more generic negotiation going on etc. Lady, you cannot compare shop low-wage work to high paid HQ positions! You are in head office, on high wage, good benefits. You sit in air conditioned rooms while shop staff are paid the least possible, are pushed to work overtime for free, work in over heated shops often in 45 degrees in the summer, and have to smile non-stop or no-one gets bonus. And then you are reprimanded and get the silent treatment for not doing the hellish clown show that Pret demand. Shops and kitchens in Pret are hell holes! Especially in the summer!
And not to mention that Pret fired Andrej Stopa for having started a trade union. So, sit down in your air conditioned head office and stop comparing shop slaves to head office overlords. And when she talks about “skills” in making tea or cappuccino,you can clearly see that she does NOT have a good example, but lowers it down to tea and coffee. It’s only tea and cappuccino, not rocket science. What she did NOT talk about, because she does NOT understand the shops and the REAL skills needed to run a food business, is health and safety issues that Pret are still appalling at.
Pictures of MOULDY food.
Ongoing mislabelling, where even vegans eat meat.
Ongoing customer complaints on IWasPoisoned.com on food poisoning gin different countries. Just a fraction of the complaints:
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After 30 years in business, Pret had and ignored TWO customer deaths and multiple injuries from unlabelled food. Pret ONLY acted once this became public. And in 2023 Westminster Council fined Pret £800,000 after Pret yet again ignored repair call-outs for a freezer door for 19 months and a staff got trapped inside the walk-in freezer for over 2.5 hours fighting for her life.
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So, it seems that Daksha Stancilas doesn’t seem to be trained herself and concentrates on tea and coffee, instead of life saving skills and training. Typical Pret.
And if the argument now is that Pret have changed and things are better, again, bullsh!t I continue to get emails from current and former staff from other countries as well. Nothing has changed except more screens, self service and more appalling customer reviews. Pret focus is to appear a bubbly, happy bunch to fool the public.
My poor experience with Pret’s LACK of skill and lack of training:
Recruiting Personality Rather than Skill can be Fatal
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I worked at Pret A Manger and survived systemic workplace bullying during bereavement that involved HR, the top leadership, HQ and even the now “retired” former CEO Clive Schlee. Schlee has been appointed CEO of itsu in 2024 by Julian Metcalfe who gave him the CEO spot at Pret many years ago.
I declined 4 settlement offers if I am silent about my ordeal. But I rather speak out to help others. For an overview of important blog entries of my experience with Pret, please visit “My Ordeal with Pret A Manger”. The little arrow to the right next to each heading will lead directly to the post.
An incomplete list on what other Pret staff say about Pret’s bullying environment: Caught in the Act Bullying at Pret and What shop MANAGERS & HQ staff say about Pret incl. CEO Pano Christou.
I tell my story for the first time verbally in below audio player interview on a podcast by The Adam Paradox, and wrote two articles in the Scottish Left Review as well as mentioned by the BBC.
Please also see the MEDIA page for more on my work with the press.
NEW LinkTree.
Thank you for reading/listening.
©2017 – Present: expret.org
A recent Interview on a Grief Podcast based in Seattle, WA, USA:
(Please be aware if the player shows 0:00 just press play)
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Bullied during bereavement in Pret A Manger 
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