Just my opinion: if you use the store card it's fine, if you're just padding your credit report, store cards fall between suboptimal and silly.
As for upgrading, I'd tell anyone never ever ever; limits and utilization can be managed, also limits can be gamed on bank cards too, and in my opinion there's never a need for frivolous new tradeline for anyone rebuilding. If you're built or you know that a whatever account is a non-issue on your credit, do whatever you want; however, a new tradeline, which isn't going to be used still anywhere outside of the retail location anyway, and provides no additional rewards and no bonus even.....
That's a frivolous new tradeline. Those are to be avoided when we're talking score management.
About the only case I can see for it is in the tradeline farming / credit report padding / AAOA buffering / whatever you want to call it, and then you can drop some goofy silly recurring charge on it without having to drive to Walmart or whatever and buy something to keep it active... and if that's the case, I'd simply recommend just closing the card as you likely have plenty of other tradelines anyway.
@Skymogul wrote:
@Revelate wrote:Just my opinion: if you use the store card it's fine, if you're just padding your credit report, store cards fall between suboptimal and silly.
I can't be entirely sure (yet), but in comparing my FICO 8 and 9 version scores, Version 9 appears to negate utilization padding by using store cards.
What have you seen data wise? Are we talking score shifts and reason codes or some random fluff interpretation of your report which is everything other than the two things mentioned? 
I did find that credit cards are counted differently than a PLOC during my all zero's testing for FICO 9:
- 3. There are no recent balances on your revolving and/or open-ended accounts.
- 4. There are no recent balances on your credit cards and/or open-ended accounts.
My PLOC reporting a balance satisified #3, but #4 stayed there... for all that store vs. bank cards have been debated in terms of FICO impact, I've never seen anything where the specific type of revolving or installment account matters outside of FICO NextGen at least through score analysis until this set of reason codes. I don't have a store card anymore to test though.
@Anonymous wrote:
@MrsCHX wrote:
@stellar wrote:I agree with you that not all store cards are bad, some have good rewards. They're great also for establishing a credit profile. There is the unfortunate part that they affect your insurance risk score/insurance rates negatively.
What "insurance"?? I keep seeing this but have seen no negative effects to my auto insurance in the ~18 months I've been rebuilding and I have a number of store cards. I don't own a home so have no homeowners insurance.
My interpretation is your rates could potentially be lower if you didn't have the store cards. However, I'm not sure how significant the savings would be since we're not privy to insurance algorithms.
In some areas of the country (varies by state) your rate can be partially determined by your credit file... and there's some scores like Lexis Nexus which are even further afield than FICO NextGen in terms of dizzying array of things which impact the score.
That said, we have no access to any of these scores, and we have no idea which in particular are being pulled (it could be Vantage or FICO or internal for all we know when it comes to insurance lenders as I don't think they have the same disclosure requirements) or if they're using scores at all, so my simple recommendation is:
Ignore it, bigger things to worry about and if you have a pretty FICO score you're likely going to score well on everything else anyway certainly better than the average consumer.
@Revelate wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@MrsCHX wrote:
@stellar wrote:I agree with you that not all store cards are bad, some have good rewards. They're great also for establishing a credit profile. There is the unfortunate part that they affect your insurance risk score/insurance rates negatively.
What "insurance"?? I keep seeing this but have seen no negative effects to my auto insurance in the ~18 months I've been rebuilding and I have a number of store cards. I don't own a home so have no homeowners insurance.
My interpretation is your rates could potentially be lower if you didn't have the store cards. However, I'm not sure how significant the savings would be since we're not privy to insurance algorithms.
In some areas of the country (varies by state) your rate can be partially determined by your credit file... and there's some scores like Lexis Nexus which are even further afield than FICO NextGen in terms of dizzying array of things which impact the score.
That said, we have no access to any of these scores, and we have no idea which in particular are being pulled (it could be Vantage or FICO or internal for all we know when it comes to insurance lenders as I don't think they have the same disclosure requirements) or if they're using scores at all, so my simple recommendation is:
Ignore it, bigger things to worry about and if you have a pretty FICO score you're likely going to score well on everything else anyway certainly better than the average consumer.
Ah okay. That makes some sense. But yeah...I'm not into micromanaging my credit scores anymore. I may if I do decide to buy a house in 2019/20. Which, we'll see. That's another conversation. 