Consumer journalist Wendy Knowler puts Wish to the test

Don’t let any retailer refuse your ‘old’ R200 note

It’s been more than decade since the Reserve Bank discontinued one particular R200 note which was heavily counterfeited, but some retailers – even very big ones – are incorrectly refusing to accept all “leopard” R200 notes.

This week it was Woolworths.

Karin d’Orville tweeted: “Absa, stop distributing ‘old’ R200 notes at your ATMs. If retailers like Woolworths at, for example, Florida Glen in Joburg, refuse to accept them as payment, and don’t inform customers about this in signs and posters in shops.”

She tagged me, so I took up the issue with Woolworths’ head office, convinced it must have been a mistake on the part of the manager of that store. That wasn’t the case.

Woolworths’ media team told me the note D’Orville had presented – she had posted a photo of it – was “no longer legal tender”.

Not so, I countered. Just because a R200 note has a leopard instead of Nelson Mandela on it doesn’t mean  it’s one of the “old” discontinued notes and therefore no longer legal tender.

There are many ways, from water marks to threads and the snap of the paper, to verify a R200 note is valid, but the easiest way to tell is this: if it has five diamonds on it, running in a line at the bottom of the note, it is legal tender.

“Yes, you are correct,” Woolworths said in its second response.

“The note is legal tender and so it appears our Florida Glen store has made a mistake.

“We had advised our store staff not to accept old ‘leopard’ R200 notes that do not have the security features, including the five diamonds along the bottom of the note.

“Unfortunately, the team member did not check for all these identifying features on this note.

“We will ensure our stores teams are reminded again about the characteristics of legal tender to avoid this happening in future.”

Knowledge is power. If a shop rejects your R200 as “old”, point out the diamonds, stand your ground and don’t let their ignorance deny you your right to pay with legal currency. With more than half of the population still transacting in cash daily, we can’t have uninformed retailers refusing to take perfectly legal banknotes we received at an ATM.

Have you shared your ID or bank account number on social media?

Perhaps you have, unwittingly.

Every week on Twitter, I see people sharing – via photo or screenshot – personal e-mails or texts revealing their ID number or cellphone number, e-mail address or bank details, and often the contact details of the company employee with whom they are corresponding.

South Africans have a lot of protection – the Protection of Personal Information Act and the Consumer Protection Act – against our personal information being misused to spam us and, more seriously, ending up in the hands of criminals who use it to commit ID fraud in our name.

Companies are legally required to go to great lengths to protect our personal information, and rightly so.

However, consumers have a responsibility to do what we can to protect our information ourselves. So don’t tick the Ts and Cs if you haven’t read them when you want free Wi-Fi, for example, or sign up for some free thing online.

When you are posting a rant on social media, don’t include images of personal documentation with your personal info.

GET IN TOUCH: Wendy Knowler specialises in consumer journalism. You can reach her via e-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za or on Twitter: @wendyknowler

BY Wendy Knowler