Was at Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) @ Kuala Lumpur at about 2pm today to get my hands on the Malaysia's New Currency Series, 4th Series. The new currency was launched yesterday by Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Najib Razak. it will be available to the general public starting from 2nd quarter of 2012.
Anyway the queue was rather long when I arrived and it took me about an hour to get to the counter. According to the police on duty, there are crazy Malaysian who started to queue as early as 2am in the morning. BNM open its door since 9am in the morning. and by the time I leave at about 4.30pm, the queue is still getting longer.
With long queue like this, people could easily mistaken this for the iPhone 4 launch.
View of the Queue from another angle.
New Currency banner.
This is the queue and the counter.
There is only 3 counter open to served the public, 2 for credit card purchase and 1 for cash purchase.
They have 3 collection as follows:
A collection of two banknotes (RM1 and RM5 denomination) - 500,000 sets priced at RM15.00 each.
A collection of a single banknote (RM20 denomination) - 500,000 sets priced at RM30.00 each.
A collection of six banknotes (RM1, RM5, RM10, RM20, RM50 and RM100 denominations) - 50,000 sets priced at RM300.00 each. For each set of this collection, all the banknote denominations will carry the same serial number.
To ensure that opportunist doesn't take advantage of this limited edition Commemorative notes sales, each person is only allow to buy 5 sets of RM1 and RM5 collection, 5 sets of RM20 collection and 1 set of the full collection. All the collection are packed nicely in an individual album complete with explanation on the notes features and design.
After queue for so long I decided to take up all allocated sets per person at RM525 and the crowd behind me follow suit. So yeah I have some extra for the single and 2 bank notes collection. Will be keep it till the right offer come by.
Meanwhile, here's my full collection:
The large one is the full set (only 50k sets), the bottom left (green) is the RM1 & RM5 set and the bottom right (brown) is the RM20 set.
Watch out for my next 3 post tomorrow where I'll give you a preview of how each individual album looks like inside.