When I ask to pay by credit card, many merchants ask me \u201cdon\u2019t you have cash?\u201d. I tell them it\u2019s none of their business whether I have cash or not. This kind of merchant behavior is rooted on the false belief that people use credit cards only when they don\u2019t have cash.<\/p>\n
Your question also seems to be based on a similar wrong premise.<\/p>\n
People use credit card instead of cash for several reasons: Deferred payment (without cost), superior fraud protection and, of course, REWARDS. In another answer, I\u2019d treated rewards as self-explanatory (Ketharaman Swaminathan’s answer to What is the advantage of having a credit card if you already have a debit card?<\/a>).<\/p>\n In this answer, I\u2019ll not get into the basics of rewards except to narrate an extreme example of this benefit.<\/p>\n A Chinese ex-cab driver turned billionaire bought the world\u2019s costliest painting a year or two ago. I don\u2019t remember the price but it was somewhere in the region of US$ 130M. He paid for it with his AmEx credit card. He accumulated so many reward miles from this transaction that he\u2019s entitled to an unlimited number of free first class flights for his lifetime.<\/p>\n It's naive to believe that people pay by cash b\/c they don't have credit card or by credit card b\/c they don't have cash.<\/p>\n — Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) February 26, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n