Getting Another Credit Card Didn't Hurt my Credit Score

Earlier this week I wrote about my latest credit score report.   My credit score was 779.     Before that it was 776 and before that it was 773.   You might notice a pattern.    Then this past week FreeMoneyFinance (one of my favorite personal finance blogs) wrote How Getting a New Credit Card Impacts Your Credit Score

It occurred to me that during that time we applied for and got a Sears credit card while buying a new dishwasher.

Here is the timeline of my credit score checks and getting that Sears card.
Dec 2009 = credit score 773
May 2010 = apply for Sears credit card
July 2010 = credit score 776
July 2011 = credit score 779

It would seem that getting that Sears card didn't have much impact on my credit score at all.    You can see that before I got the Sears card my credit score was 773 and then after I got the card it had gone up to 776.     Its possible that the card application had a negative short term impact but if so then it didn't last.    I would expect though that if there was a large impact to the credit score that it would have lingered longer or had more impact in general.  

I should point out that this isn't super scientific.   Ideally I would have wanted to check the credit score the week before I applied for the credit card and then checked it again the week after and then monitored it for a while longer.