Work for Pret A Manger and save yourself £27,000 in university fees was the message from ceo Clive Schlee, as the sandwich chain rolls out a school leaver programme and announces 500 new UK jobs.
Pret A Manger has announced 500 new UK jobs and revealed details of its school leaver programme
Schlee revealed that accusations – including from London mayor Boris Johnson – that his stores employed too few British workers had stung the 320-shop chain, prompting a drive to recruit would-be students.
"It [the school leavers' programme] was stimulated by the need to address some criticisms in the press about Pret having too many foreign workers in London," Schlee told FoodManufacture.co.uk.
"We thought we must find more British workers, where are they? At the time, the cost of [studying at] universities had jumped from £3,000 to £9,000. So, we figured there would be a market out there for bright people who didn't want to commit three years' charges at £9,000 a year.
Careers departments
"We set about making friends with the careers departments of schools that were dynamic and wanted to do things for their kids, and finding those near our shops."
Pret interviewed 150 applicants and chose 10, who – after the year-long programme's completion – become permanent members of staff. "We hope that they'll then get promoted to a trainer, a leader, a manager - it will get them going," said Schlee.
The programme – along with 1,000 new international jobs in total – will help fuel its store expansion plans, which grew by 10% in 2012 – standing at about 250 in the UK.
But Schlee would not cap a figure for its growth ambitions. "The number always changes every time we do well," he said. "We never believed we would have 150 stores in London 10 years ago. All we know is Pret is well under-represented when it comes to coffee shops or Pizza Express or Tesco. We're only a third of their size in terms of shops numbers, so there are plenty more to come."
Failure of Fresh & Easy
Part of that drive will come from new entries into Paris and Boston, USA, highlighting a successful US expansion, where Tesco was recently sent into retreat, following the failure of its Fresh & Easy-branded chain.
Schlee maintained that Pret's "self-sufficient" business model of shops with kitchens making sandwiches fresh each day, was the difference between its success and the failure of the UK's biggest supermarket.
"Tesco had to put a big fixed cost element in when they started – their supply depots and so on," he said.
"Pret builds each shop in a self-sufficient way with a kitchen. We have never been in a situation where we've had a vast fixed overhead. Where we get to a situation where shops aren't profitable, you either stop building them – and that's pretty nasty; or you carry on building them – and that's pretty nasty! We haven't had to face that – we've taken it shop by shop and we didn't start expanding properly until the shops were profitable."
Meanwhile, earlier this week the chain unveiled results from a boom year in 2012, with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation up by 17% to £61.1M.
