The world changes and the nature of the jobs needed changes. We no longer have chimney sweeps or gas lamp lighters in anything like the numbers we did. But we have new jobs like computer technicians and call-centre workers.
Those ex-Pret workers will have to work in jobs for which there is a demand,e.g. supermarket picking. We can’t artificially keep their unneeded jobs going.
Seriously? Do you genuinely think that the catering and hospitality industry is analogous to the chimney sweeping industry (if you can call it that!) from Victorian times?
Do you know how important the catering/hospitality industry is to the UK economy? Clearly not. If a large part of that closes down, you can’t just airily say, “oh, they can just get a job in a call centre or in a supermarket”. What makes you think that demand in those industries is going to increase significantly starting from now? Tesco might be recruiting some extra roles but that’s not going to absorb all the people who work on city centres supplying consumer needs.
What do you think Eat Out to Help Out was about? Giving people access to cheap dinners so that they could save £10? No, it was about propping up a major industry that employs loads of people.
That is why several posters have pointed out that your savings on transport to work, sandwiches etc. don’t come at nil cost. Somebody will be paying the price, and it’s most likely going to be the lower paid people who work in cafes, in sandwich shops, in the factories preparing sandwiches and salads for city centre shops to sell (Greencore, one of the biggest suppliers, tend to site their factories in poorer areas) and in cleaning catering outlets.
I think that the debate is academic anyway: during the 2008/09 financial crisis we were told that there would be a permanent shift in how we lived our lives, but there wasn’t. People have short memories. I suspect that in two years’ time we’ll be back to living and working very much as we did pre-Covid.