Thousands have backed a former bakery manager who was sacked in June after she paid for customers' purchases with her own card so that they could use cash.
Megan Metcalfe, 60, had worked at the Birds bakery in Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire for 44 years, the BBC reports. The firm said it had taken the decision to fire Ms Metcalfe "with regret" but that she had broken its coronavirus policies.
"I was made to feel really bad for helping lots of people," she said.
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"These are the people that have been shopping with them for years and keeping their business up, and for them to just want to turn them away is disgusting.
"They [Birds] are not going to reinstate me, but they haven't made any form of apology to these customers.
"Not everybody wants to use card payments. Some people don't want a card and some aren't allowed one."
Ms Metcalfe accepted 45 cash payments over the course of several weeks, totaling £183.
Now, two petitions have been set up, calling for the bakery to reinstate Ms Metcalfe to her position and accept cash payments. According to the BBC, one petition now has more than 9,000 signatures, while the other has 14,000.
People have also been weighing in on the issue on Twitter. One commenter wrote, "Time to boycott #BirdsBakery for their failure to ensure the elderly can pay using cash and instead leaving them to go hungry, plus their sacking of an employee that used her own debit card to solve their problem for gross misconduct"
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Though she now had a job in a care home, Ms Metcalffe said it was "wonderful" to have so much support.
Katherine Clarke, one of the organizers said, "Everyone is so angry about the way she has been treated.
"She was only trying to help her community."
She continued, "don't discriminate against people that don't have a bank card, especially the elderly as that's their main customer demographic."
Per the BBC, CEO Lesley Bird said that it was regrettable that Ms Metcalfe had to "leave the business" but that handling money represented a risk to staff.
"A lot of our customer base are the elderly and it is our responsibility to keep them, and our staff, safe," she said. "Like many other food outlets, during this pandemic we have asked customers to only use debit cards because notes and coins are not clean."