A Bloomberg analysis of coffee-and-sandwich sales shows New York trailing London, Paris, and Hong Kong in its post-pandemic recovery.
A Bloomberg analysis of coffee-and-sandwich sales shows New York trailing London, Paris, and Hong Kong in its post-pandemic recovery.
T homas Buckley and Jeremy Scott Diamond have an interesting piece for Bloomberg today about what they’re calling the “Pret Index.” They have weekly sales data from the U.K.-based coffee-and-sandwich chain Pret A Manger, which is dominant in London and has expanded to other cities, including New York.
Pret A Manger is not the kind of place you go for fun or because you really love the food. It’s the kind of place you go to get coffee with a co-worker, grab a quick sandwich on your way to or from the office, or because you’re stuck in an airport and it’s the only place open near your gate. Given that, sales at Pret are a reasonable proxy for some of the activities that were most curtailed during the pandemic: commuting, air travel, and working in an office.
Buckley and Diamond take January 2020 sales as the baseline, right before the pandemic. To calculate the Pret Index, they divide the weekly sales data for a particular week by the January 2020 baseline. So a Pret Index of 0.7, for example, would mean Pret sales are 70 percent of what they were before the pandemic. A Pret Index below 1.0 means sales are lower than pre-pandemic, and a Pret Index above 1.0 means sales are higher than pre-pandemic.
They compare the data in different areas. They find the Pret Index for the London financial district is 0.83. At the start of the pandemic, it was around 0.3, and it has never exceeded 0.89. There was a huge dip in the index during the omicron wave, confirming the viability of the index to model reopening.
The Pret Index for the London West End, the entertainment-and-shopping district, was slightly higher at 0.88. The index actually exceeded 1.0 at various points over the past year. The authors note that “Londoners felt more comfortable venturing out for leisure than returning to the office.” (It’s almost as though Covid concerns aren’t really the driving issue for some people.)
The Pret Index for London airports has been soaring since the start of the year as more travelers take to the skies. It’s currently at 1.4, which means sales are 40 percent higher than they were pre-pandemic. It was around 0.1 in March 2020, the lowest of any area in the article.
Paris looks roughly the same as London, with a Pret Index of 0.81. Hong Kong is at 0.65. It was around 0.8 at the start of the pandemic and held steady for months but saw its steepest decline earlier this year as the largely unvaccinated population there was put under lockdown.
But New York City has never seen its Pret Index exceed 0.8 since the pandemic began. In downtown Manhattan, the Pret Index is only 0.38, and in midtown, it’s 0.45. The authors note that the “bounceback hasn’t materialized” in New York as it has in London. The highest reading for New York was a 0.72 for midtown in November 2021. Downtown has been consistently below 0.6.
It could be the case that people just aren’t eating at Pret A Manger as much as they used to in New York. But other data show the same trend. MTA ridership numbers remain well below pre-pandemic levels. This past work week, average subway ridership was 58 percent of pre-pandemic levels and average commuter-rail ridership (LIRR and Metro-North) was at 60 percent.
Weekend ridership, on the other hand, is doing much better. Weekend subway ridership was at 77 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and commuter rail was at 95 percent. That would seem to indicate a similar trend as the discrepancy between the Pret Index for the financial district and the West End in London. People riding MTA trains on weekends are probably doing so for leisure, whereas weekdays are for work. And people going into Manhattan for leisure are more likely to have a destination in midtown than in downtown, which would help explain the higher Pret Index there.
Bridge-and-tunnel traffic is roughly 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels every day of the week. Since the Pret Index would indicate that fewer people are going into the city in general and MTA ridership is still way down, that probably means a sizable chunk of commuters who used to ride the subway or commuter rail have switched to driving. Between deteriorating service and a surge in crime on public transit, it’s hard to blame them.
If it were exclusively Covid concerns that were keeping people away, we wouldn’t see these discrepancies between weekend and weekday travel or between midtown and downtown. People seem more willing to go into the city for a Broadway show than to return to the office. This was probably always the case (leisure is more fun than work — that’s the point!), but the option of remote work post-pandemic has now made it possible for many more people to act on that preference.
That makes it even more important for New York public officials to take quality-of-life concerns seriously. People are already more hesitant than in other cities to return to their ordinary pre-pandemic lives, for non-pandemic reasons. Dirty, unsafe subways and increasing violent crime will be sure to keep those Pret A Mangers less busy than they otherwise would be.