This is a Scottish £5 note. It doesn’t look much like an English £5 note, smells slightly of haggis, and if you hold it to your ear you can hear the sound of distant bagpipes. It is nevertheless legal tender throughout the United Kingdom and has equal value to it’s English counterpart.
Or that’s the theory anyway. In reality a lot of shops refuse to take them, presumably believing they are some weird Albanian goat trading chits rather than British currency. If you don’t believe me try printing out the above image and spending it at a shop, I bet you won’t get very far.
This negative attitude towards Scottish money is incredibly infuriating. Scotland is only about a hundred miles away from us, you would have thought our shopkeepers would be at least aware of it’s existence. I can perhaps excuse the smaller shops of there reluctance to take them. You don’t see that many of them around (probably because everyone tries to get rid of them before they leave Scotland), and so their unfamiliarity with them may possibly leave them open to counterfeiters.
I once tried to pay for a takeaway curry with one and it was refused. As I didn’t have any other money or credit cards on me the owner of the shop told me to take the curry anyway and come back another day and pay for it. I tried to point out the ridiculousness of him not trusting me to pay with a legal banknote but yet having the faith in me to voluntarily bring him some money later. He was adamant that that was how he wanted to do it however so I ended up trailing back with an English note the next day.
As I say, I have some sympathy for the little shops in this matter. For the bigger ones however there is no excuse.
Earlier this week I went to Tescos (the biggest supermarket chain in the UK). When I tried to pay for my Diet Coke with a Scottish £5 the woman at the checkout refused to take it. She acknowledged that it was legal tender, but said that it was store policy not to accept them. In Scotland Tescos has roughly 20% of the grocery retailing market share. It must be pretty bloody hard to make a profit if they don’t accept any banknotes. Arses.
Luckily I had enough change to pay with coins, one of which was a 5p piece minted in Jersey. That’ll teach the bastards.
(Wikipedia – Banknotes of the pound sterling)
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I’ve just spent about 20 minutes writing a response, including loads of info on legal tender and the scottish currency system.
Also featured were quips about customer rights and the history of various banks.
Suffice to say it was very interesting, and showed how clever I am.
I’ve just forfeited the rights to claim any sort of intelligence for a while, as I’ve accidentally closed the window in which I had written the response.
Maybe later. For now, here’s a couple of links that I can remember.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_notes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender
Arse.
Ooo, those links were interesting. So I was wrong to say that the note was legal tender after all?
Tescos are still bastards though.
I look forward to your dissertation if you decide to re-type it.
Well, my usual 11am meeting has now been cancelled, so now I have to find something else to fill my time. I’ll try to remember all the fancy words I used, as I was quite pleased with them the first time round.
And it went a little something like this… (hit it)
Glaringly obvious error there, I’m afraid Dan – Scottish notes aren’t legal tender in England (and strangely, nor in Scotland either). It’s all to do with the terminology “legal tender”, which is a phrase associated with the settlement of a debt. For example, you couldn’t use Scottish notes to pay off your overdraft legally (though as the notes are known as “promissory notes”, chances are your money would be accepted and the debt written off.
I think that for any debt up to 20p, pennies are accepted as legal tender. Anything greater than 20p and you’ve to use another denomination.
As for the curry-vendor and Tesco cashier refusing to accept your Scottish notes, they had every right to do so. A retailer – or their representative – can refuse to accept the notes or coins that you present for any reason at all (perhaps they simply didn’t like the cut of your jib?), and as a customer, you can request an alternative note/coin if you don’t like the look of the one they give you in your change.
Asking for a different note just for the sake of it tends to rile most shopkeepers, so I’d advise against it.
Another interesting fact (not included in the original post) is that shopkeepers aren’t legally obliged to offer you any change if you pay with a note of greater value than the product you’re buying.
Say you buy a 2 litre bottle of Diet Coke, priced at £1.45. Buy displaying the price label, the shop is inviting you to pay £1.45. If you don’t feel that the refreshing beverage is worth £1.45, you can perhaps offer £1.30, and it’s up to the retailer to accept or refuse your offer. By silently handing over a £20 note, you are in effect offering £20 for the bottle.
It stands to reason that shopkeepers wouldn’t have much repeat business, though their first day’s profits would probably see them through the rest of the year…
A lot of people aren’t aware that if you go to a restaurant but don’t like the food, you can agree to pay for only as much as you eat (common sense dictates that if you ate the whole lot, it can’t have been that bad, so you can’t reasonably claim the meal for free…)
I’m sure there’s something I missed out from my first post, but you got an extra bit about shopkeepers and a note about restaurants, so if that doesn’t keep you happy, I don’t know what would.
(Other than a bottle of Diet Coke for a mere £1.30)
Yeah, they won’t accept it here either, the bastards. I have a hard time spending my confederate money as well.
Holmes stole my comment, and apparently at 3:19 later this afternoon.
That’s the first time I’ve noticed we get to leave comments in some kind of wormhole to the future. Cool!
Aah, I remember this problem from my time spent, a million years ago (or maybe just 11 years ago), living in Scotland. I earned my money in cash, including a lot of Scottish banknotes. At the end of my Scottish bartending gig I moved on to London, where many shopkeepers did not want to take my money. From what drunken Scots informed me, most non-Scottish shopkeepers don’t want to take Scottish pounds because it somehow makes more work for them. It’s usually just a bluff, like, “I will tell this person that we don’t accept their currency to force out the British pounds.” If you push the issue, though, they will take it. I used to have to argue with people all of the time, but they always took the money when I said, “Okay then, I guess I will go spend this money somewhere else…” I always just thought they were trying to push me around because I was American.
Oh, and another thing I learned from the drunken Scots…English shopkeepers not accepting Scottish pounds is just another reflection of the overall English bigotry toward the Scots and their fear of the mighty Scottish race. Or something like that.
And vice versa!
So…silly American question…why not just change to the Euro?
Americanmum – Good grief woman, I’m not touching that one with a ten foot barge pole.
think of the outrage that would occure by asking the American public to change the dollar to the Mexican Peso. Now multiply that by thousands of years of wars and antagonism. Add in a crumbled Empire’s feelings of growing irrelivance on the world stage. And then you have many British people’s attitude towards switching to the Euro (although not mine).
To be fair the Scottish £5 note looks like it HAS been printed on a xerox. Every time I go to Norther Ireland, I have to spend all my Irish £5 on chocolate at the airport before I come back to avoid a trip to the bank.
I’m about 100 miles from the Canadian border. Here in Idaho, we LOVE LOVE LOVE Canadians coming down here to spend their money on our fancy widgets and hoozits at Wal-Mart.
But they darn well better leave their Canadian monopoly money at the border! We don’t want none of that funny money around here.
Actually, I enjoy slipping a Canadian quarter into a pop machine every now and then. You can still find some that are foolish enough to accept them.
My mother went to the bank to change some Stirling into Euros before she went on holiday in Belgium. The cashier said that they’d have to order some, but they’d be ready tomorrow.
My mum’s exasperated response was to state, “I thought the single currency was meant to alleviate all this hassle”.
I’m all for keeping the pound. It’s the strongest (and oldest) currency in the world. And long may it continue!
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Queen!
Never had one refused.
First you win my iPod, then you get your Scottish £5 notes accepted.
I officially hate you.