A woman who has worked for a bakery for more than 40 years has been sacked after she was found to be taking cash from customers and using her debit card to pay.

Birds Bakery, in Radcliffe-on-Trent, near Nottingham, dismissed Megan Metcalfe on the grounds of gross misconduct.

During the coronavirus crisis the bakery said it is not accepting cash for hygiene reasons, and wants to minimise any risk to staff and customers.

Megan, who is 60, 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.’

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A lot of customers at the store are elderly and don’t have a card, she explained.

Megan says she took around £180 of payments in cash and put them through on
her card and has kept receipts of the transactions.

She said she was suspended from work for a week with full pay on June 19 an appeared before a disciplinary hearing the week after before being dismissed from the company.

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

‘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.

‘I should not have done it but I don’t like to let people down and a lot of these customers depend on us, coming to us every day.’

Bosses at the bakery business said it was ‘with regret’ they had to dismiss Megan because of her actions.

Lesley Bird, chief operating officer at Birds Bakery, said: ‘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.

‘Like many other food outlets, during this pandemic we have asked customers to only use debit cards because notes and coins are not clean – and this poses a risk to our staff who are handling that money.

‘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.’

This week it was reported a 94-year-old customer who wanted to buy bread from another branch of Birds Bakery in Nottingham had to leave empty handed because she only had cash.

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