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B and R, 28 and 33, baristas at Pret A Manger, Central london

From outside, the plate glass almost seems to glow. Inside, I pass a photo of Stonehenge made of butter and tread over faux wood to reach the rows of cut sandwiches. It’s lunchtime and I pick a tuna salad – the tuna in its beige, flaky diagonal, egg discs alongside it, as it always is – and a man in a TEAM PRET shirt refilling the fridge with water bottles turns to me and smiles. I queue for the till: ‘Can I help?’ ‘Would you like a tray?’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Many thanks, madam.’ ‘Thank you very much.’ The server smiles and scrunches up the receipt I don’t want, and I leave the shop feeling different from the way I felt when I came in.

Pret A Manger, which runs 300 shops worldwide and made £61 million in profit in 2013, has precision-tuned customer mood. ‘The first thing I look at,’ said Clive Schee, Pret CEO, taking a journalist on a tour of his cafés in 2012, ‘is whether staff are touching each other: are they smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged? Look, she’s just touched her colleague

– squeezed her arm. If I see hands going up in the air, that’s a

good sign. I can almost predict sales on body language alone.’ Schee’s almost flirtatious ‘good signs’, however, aren’t sponta-neous. Each employee is given a book detailing ‘Pret Behaviours’ which has three columns on each page: ‘Want to see’, ‘Don’t want to see’ and ‘Pret Perfect!’ For a chain in which even the

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serviettes speak to the customer – ‘if Pret staff get all serviette-ish and hand you huge bunches of napkins (which you don’t need or want) please given them the evil eye’ – it is not enough to make someone a decent cup of coffee, to keep the tables clean, to turn up every day because you need the money. The first core ‘Pret Behaviour’ is passion.

B, who wanted to be an astronaut when he was little, arrived in London from the Czech Republic in 2009 to study finance, and worked at Pret throughout his degree, from 2010 to 2013. He stayed mostly in the kitchens but was also trained on the till: ‘There are two things. First thing is the transaction: when the customer comes to you, he gives you a baguette, he wants a coffee, he makes an order and you will charge him. But there’s another part which is really big in Pret A Manger and it’s the smile, and also the conversation you should have with the customer. You are encouraged to have a little chat with the customer while his coffee is being prepared. This was extremely challenging for me because I come from a nation where strangers normally don’t talk to each other. And when someone was telling me: “Just ask the customer how he is, how was his weekend, stuff like that.” I was like: “I don’t know what to ask him, you know! I don’t even care!”’ B, tall and muscular with a shaved head, laughed as he described a colleague who arrived bouncily at 4 a.m. every morning, and charmed the customers despite her imperfect English. ‘She was always asking customers: “How was your weekend?” And I thought: that’s a good question. I can ask them how was your weekend. So I was always asking: “How are you? How was your weekend?” But the problem was that I was still doing it on Thursday!’

His manager gave him an exemption from smiling. After a year he knew how to make most of the sandwiches by heart, laying the slippery avocado from corner to corner of the bread, and he began to feel he understood English ways a bit better. B’s shifts began at 4 a.m. and finished at 12 p.m. – the managers

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would always ask him to stay longer but he needed to sleep before getting up again to go to lectures. He was paid £6.22 an hour, just over the minimum wage (which was £6.19 an hour in 2012), but there was a big party each year, free lunch and the weekly bonus. Over a year, he would earn something approaching £13,000. Friends in the Czech Republic envied him: ‘I would love this job, it’s so perfect.’

Unlike other restaurants where customers can reward service by tipping, at Pret the tip was automatically part of the salary, and employees could only lose it. ‘At first I didn’t believe the mystery shopper existed,’ B’s friend R, who worked at Pret a few years before B did, said. ‘I thought it was like Santa Claus: something to keep you in line.’ If the mystery shopper employed by Pret to spy on itself didn’t observe ‘passion’ the whole shop would lose that week’s bonus. Eighty per cent of mystery shoppers are satisfied on their visits, which is just as well as the weekly basic salary of £200 went up to £245 with the bonus. ‘It’s a pressure on you,’ R said. ‘From Monday to Monday every single customer that you serve you have to give your absolute 100 per cent.’ If you lost the shop its bonus, everyone knew about it. R described Pret as ‘like a church, or congregation’: ‘I’ve had quite a few jobs and I don’t know if I worked physically the hardest there, but it was definitely the most stressful because you felt responsible at any point in the chain. There wasn’t really anywhere to hide.’

In his first year, B had four ‘file notes’, or informal warnings. One was given because he was sick more than three times, another because his uniform was dirty, but each time he went to see the manager, the file notes turned out to be about something else. Did he have to play nu metal while he worked? The Euro crisis had worsened that May and graduates worked in Pret for lack of other jobs. B stayed on. After a year’s employment, he knew he could claim for unfair dismissal, and so ‘lost the fear’: when

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he saw a manager breaking rules he pointed it out. The manage-ment staged an investigation of him; B defended himself by filing a grievance. Pret struck a compromise and transferred both him and the manager to different branches across London. ‘They were just waiting for me to slip,’ B said.

At the new shop, every sarcastic comment B made became a disciplinary matter; each time he received a warning he filed a grievance in his defence. Then in 2012 he made a claim to the Employment Tribunal for whistleblowing for £10,000. Pret suddenly gave him a fixed schedule (whereas shifts were deter-mined as late as the night before), increased his pay to £7.80 an hour (including bonus), and sent his payslips to him by post when colleagues often didn’t even receive theirs at work. He said to his fellow team members: ‘Do you think this is right? Look at me, I’m getting my payslips by post!’ And they began to come to him with their problems. One was being threatened with dismissal, another on a full-time contract wasn’t being given the contracted hours. B helped them write grievances of their own. ‘It was really easy. People didn’t know that there were any procedures. Or that they are protected by the law in this country.’ (Ninety-one per cent of Pret’s workers in London are immigrants: Pret admit they prefer their employees ‘flexible’.) B noticed an odd thing in the first draft of their grievances: they didn’t include their manager’s name. ‘The biggest part is the fear: nobody wants to write a letter saying the manager did something.’

It wasn’t B’s idea to start the Pret A Manger Staff Union (Pamsu); he was more interested in a campaign demanding the London Living Wage (£9.15 an hour, without bonus). A Colombian colleague, B and four others sat down to write ‘a list of demands’: they sent them to Pret HQ on 1 September 2012, with a request that their union be recognised. Pamsu emailed every branch of Pret, and many people joined. B remembers that the Italians signed up with most alacrity. But the company chose

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not to recognise Pamsu: it proposed dealing with each union member individually, undermining the collective action they wished to take. B was called to a disciplinary meeting with less than twenty-four hours’ notice and fired for a silly comment he’d made ten months before, that his branch of Pret was the ‘gay’ branch. The timing didn’t feel to him like a coincidence. Other Pamsu members were scared and fell away, but B protested his dismissal outside his old shop with a few supporters from the Solidarity Federation, a section of the International Workers Association; the police let them wave a banner for half an hour before bundling them away. Articles about his dismissal appeared in the Daily Mail, the London Evening Standard, The Independent: each focused on the way Pret controls its employees by withdrawing bonuses on one hand and encouraging smiling on the other.

In the meantime, B graduated with a First Class degree in July 2013 and flew to Bangkok, hoping to teach English. He came back to London that winter and worked in NCP car parks before finding work that used his degree as a research analyst in Central London. He plans to return to the Czech Republic one day and go into politics. ‘I’m proud,’ B said. ‘I know the other people just take the beating without doing anything. I might have a problem in the future to find a job, but I know that Pret couldn’t humiliate me in any way. I know that I caused a lot of damage to their reputation. They damaged my reputation too. I’m an individual, you know, and they are a fucking corpora-tion. And I stood up against them.’ He receives at least an email a week into the Pamsu email account though the union is effec-tively defunct: ‘You can always do something, you know. You can always give them some basic advice. In most cases, you can avoid the disciplinary very easily. They’re just so scared because they have no clue about the procedures.’ Last time B tried to go back to see colleagues at his old Pret, the manager refused to serve him. A few weeks later, HR wrote to him to apologise: as a

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customer he would always be welcome. Even someone Pret had fired would still be permitted the warm glow of the ‘Pret Behav-iours’ when he was paying.

After leaving Pret, B has begun volunteering at an informal refugee centre, where he met R. Twice a week, they spend four hours cooking and serving food that would otherwise be wasted for people under threat of deportation; they couldn’t tell me where it was because the Home Office w ould ‘ love’ t o k now the location. ‘Customer service in the shelter is personal. You know who you’re serving,’ B said. ‘There are no name badges or anything like that,’ R added. B laughed. ‘You can lose your bonus for not using your name badge! Where’s your name badge?’ He said he almost felt selfish w hen h e worked a t t he shelter ‘because when I cook food and serve it to the people, I feel good about myself ’. Pret was a simulacrum of service; this was the real thing. ‘I’m not from a religious background, but the whole process of serving somebody … it’s good for everyone,’ R said. ‘You’re giving them service but at the same time, they’re feeling welcomed.’

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