There's a built in assumption here that you need credit... if you don't need credit then all this is moot. Everyone's so keen to be part of the system that they never stop to wonder what they're chasing... there are justifications and rationalizing and whatever else it takes to belong. None of it's necessary. The 1-3% cash back and the air miles and the fraud protection and all these other goodies they promise you are bribery to use their card so that they can get the scale they need to make the system profitable for them. They sell your information, aggregate it to marketing companies, it's a means to track your every purchase electronically etc. etc.

If you'd paid cash you could have got a better deal from suppliers by negotiating cash discounts and nobody would be aggregating your information or tracking your purchases to target advertising to try to further their way into your wallet. If you'd paid the $10K up front, which you had the cash to do so, what did you do with that $10K? Did it just sit in your bank giving you an illusion of a bank balance or did you invest it to make some return to justify putting it on credit and putting off until tomorrow what you could have paid for today? You purchased this kitchen effectively putting a lien on that money, it's no longer yours... but having it in your account still gives you the illusion that it is. It only takes something unexpected happening and that money that's not yours [which is still in your account] is easy to dip into for an emergency with the expectation that you'll pay back into it another day when you can afford that - a day that never comes, until that kitchen you've been enjoying for the last 18 months and now can't live without needs paying for...

It's ridiculously easy to get sucked into the trap of cycling one debt after another and then you're stuck with your only options being: Sell everything you own to pay it off, claim bankruptcy and start again from scratch or strive for a higher paying job, putting yourself under extra stress... and for what? The ability to raise your debt load. It's not really much surprise, the entire capitalist economy is built on debt, without it, there would be no economy. The U.S. currency is loaned (at interest) by the Fed to the U.S. Government, so debt goes right to the very foundation of the entire economy. So it's an ever perpetuating cycle.

There are rationalizations on both sides of the fence. For the record, I'm not dead against credit, I'm just saying that for every rationalization that can be offered to use credit, there are equally many reasons to avoid it.