We all remember when the $5 note came out don’t we? You would take that new and crisp beauty to the nearest vending machine to get a packet of lollies, only for it to be rejected over and over again, as you desperately try inserting it from every conceivable position.
Well, if you are a moneybags who sometimes uses $10 notes to buy treats, you might experience the same thing all over again from tomorrow, when the new banknote commences circulation.
The tenner shares some security features with the fiver in order to make Australian cash monies harder to circulate, like the clear panel that spans from top to bottom of the note and which contains different elements. There’s also a tactile feature, which will assist the vision impaired. Nice.
The note has the same colours as the existing one, and still has old mates AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Dame Mary Gilmore on it, but also has a rolling colour effect, and this cute little cockatoo.
As for the troubles the $5 note caused last year, Lindsay Boulton from the Reserve Bank of Australia said they will be expecting fewer problems this year.
That’s our expectation, but again it really depends on the business decision of the equipment manufacturers and operators. For the $5 note, we made production quality banknotes available to the manufacturers and operators some six months in advance. We’ve done the same for the new $10 bank note.
Coles and Woolies reckon that they have upgraded their systems enough in order to except the note, but Tabcorp says their betting machines won’t be equipped until October. And according to Nick Aronis, president of the National Vending Association (a thing that exists), it’s likely that heaps of the 100k vending machines in Australia will not be up to date in time. He told iTnews:
As the current $10 note will remain in circulation for some time, the urgency is not there to have everything updated. It is up to the individual operator, company and industry to have this in place as the need arises as well as affordability.
It’s alleged by vending machine operators that they have to pay a license fee for each individual machine to be upgraded, and it requires a physical visit to the machine, so some are simply not going to be done in time.
So if you are fangin’ for some chips on a train station platform anytime soon, you better make sure you have something beside the new note in your pocket.
