Woman sacked at bakery for allowing elderly customers to pay with cash

A loyal employee who has worked at a bakery for 44 years has been sacked after allowing elderly customers without cards to pay by cash.

Megan Metcalfe, 60, was sacked by Birds Bakery in Radcliffe-on-Trent, Notts, after it stopped accepting cash for hygiene reasons.

She accepted around £180 in cash from customers and then used her debit card to pay for the transactions.

Ms Metcalfe said:

“I realise what I was doing was against company policy. But they had picked up the items and already gotten to the till ready to buy them.

There’s no way I could let an elderly man or woman walk away telling them they could not buy it because they didn’t have a card. They had also already handled the stock so that would have to be binned or cleaned.

I was just trying to do the right thing. I am really upset by it, of course.

I worked at Birds for 44 years and 25 of them as a manager. I was told I was endangering staff members’ lives by doing what I did.

At no point did money transfer hands. It was straight into my purse and then I put the payment through on card and showed them the receipt.

This comes after a 94-year-old woman was told she couldn’t buy bread from Birds bakery because she didn’t have a bank card.

Former hosiery worker Edna Dalchin has never owned a bank card and prefers to pay with cash.

She was left hurt and embarrassed when staff told her to put items back because they could not take her money.

Lesley Bird, Group COO of Birds Bakery said in a statement:

“At Birds, we take the safety of our staff and customers very seriously – and have very tight procedures in place during this pandemic.

A lot of our customer base are the elderly – many of them vulnerable – and it is our responsibility to keep them, and our staff, safe.

In the case of Megan Metcalfe she was taking cash from customers and then making payments with her own card.

This contravenes our current health and safety policy relating to Covid-19 and is also against company regulations.

It was with regret that we had to ask Megan to leave the business because of those two issues.”