Woolworths Credit Card - Is It A Donkey?

Beware when a grocer gets involved in financial services. They are normally found to be out of their depth as soon as a problem arises. In this case both Woolworths Financial Services & ABSA are implicated. In my case it revolves around the Woolworths Credit Card. Yes - the Black one with the R69 'service fee'. The moment you see 'service fee' you can usually be sure that little or no service is involved. In this respect they do not disappoint - using every excuse from a 72 hour turnaround time to answer queries (really?) to the pandemic (yawn). The bottom line is that my Woolworths Credit Card, after much tooing and froing, only works at Woolworths. Every other payment at every other outlet is declined. All reports submitted to Woolworths are politely returned with the answer stating that the card is working just fine. This charade has been going on for weeks. In the meantime I am sitting with a substantial credit balance in the account which I am unable use to pay other providers.