As shoppers gear up for Black Friday and the holiday shopping season, it can be easy for people to rack up debt that will weigh them down well into the new year. So it pays for consumers to be aware of some of the tactics retailers employ to get them to spend. 

For example, most offers that dangle savings in the form of free shipping or a free gift if you spend over a certain amount don’t save you money. The practice, called “spaving,” or spending more in order to save, rarely benefits consumers, according to personal finance experts.

“I understand the appeal of getting to checkout and a notification pops up saying spend $10 more to get some perk,” LendingTree senior economist Jacob Channel told CBS MoneyWatch. “But 90% of the time when you break it down, it doesn’t make sense. You’re not actually saving money if you are spending more of it.”

Here are five tactics retailers use to get you to spend more, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a consumer advocacy group.

Creating a false sense of urgency

The fear of missing out on a good deal can nudge consumers into making impulse buys. Although some offers really are only valid for a limited time, U.S. PIRG identified a number of sellers on Etsy, an e-commerce site for independent craftspeople, who used fake countdown clocks for deals that never expire. 

Of 20 top-selling products on the site with countdown timers on deals, 80% of them simply reset when their tickers tickers hit “0,” according to a PIRG study. 

“The ‘limited’ time window may not be as limited as it sounds and the deals not as good as they seem,” U.S. PIRG’s R.J. Cross told CBS MoneyWatch. “Make your list, comparison shop on those items, and don’t get distracted by offers you haven’t had the time to think through.”

Implying scarcity

Online retailers may label products as “selling fast!” or, as a consumer is considering a purchase, display how many other consumers are browsing the same item.

“Retailers and advertisers are always trying to get you to buy more than you need and spend more than you want,” Cross said in a statement. “Once you know what to look for, you end up chuckling when you see these tactics instead of falling for them.”

Pricing tricks

Ever wonder why a price reads $4.99 and not simply $5? When sellers round an item’s price down, it suggests to a shopper that it is cheaper, PIRG notes. Although $4.99 is only a penny less than $5, a shopper is more likely to fixate on the dollar figure — $4 — versus the cents. 

Even removing a comma from a high sticker price like $1,200 and displaying it as $1200 can entice someone to pull the trigger, according to PIRG. Meanwhile, breaking the cost of an item down into monthly installments can also make the price seem smaller than it really is, the organization noted. 

“You’re still going to have to pay the full cost, and sometimes even more in late fees, if you’re not careful,” Cross pointed out. 

Dubious testimonials

Many retailers feature online testimonials ostensibly from customers raving about a “life-changing” vacuum cleaner or pair of sweatpants. Some of these account are from real customers, while other reviews cannot be trusted because they have been generated by a bot or the company itself, PIRG said.

At bottom, it’s a form of peer pressure — shoppers are subtly induced to think that buying the product will make them as happy as the satisfied customers depicted in the testimonial. In reality, many online reviews are fake, especially as AI bots proliferate. 

“When you look at reviews on a product, don’t necessarily take the star ratings for granted. Better to look through the comments and find those that seem real — that either include a picture of the product or that make a point specific to the product instead of a generic note like ‘great product!'” Cross recommends.

Appeals based on fear

Many marketing pitches and ads suggest that your life will somehow be worse if you don’t make a purchase, from being at risk of a home invasion to hair loss. With e-commerce, of course, such messages are tailored to your individual interests and tastes given that website cookies track share your browsing patterns with retailers.

Messages “about how to fix our perceived flaws only become more capable of finding us at all hours of the day whenever we go online,” Cross said. 

A dentist accused of killing his wife by poisoning her protein shakes has been charged with trying to get a fellow jail inmate to kill a detective investigating the murder case.

Prosecutors filed two new charges against James Craig last week – solicitation to commit murder as well as solicitation to commit perjury. The charging document does not say who Craig allegedly wanted to have killed but a spokesperson for Aurora police, Joe Moylan, confirmed late Wednesday that the alleged intended victim was an Aurora police detective.

Online court records did not list a lawyer representing Craig as of Thursday. A judge allowed Craig’s latest lawyer, Harvey Steinberg, to withdraw from the case Nov. 21, after he cited a professional conflict, just as Craig was about to stand trial for first-degree murder in the death of Angela Craig. Prosecutors filed the two new charges against Craig the following day.

Craig’s trial has been delayed indefinitely. Craig, who has pleaded not guilty, is scheduled to appear in court with a new lawyer on Dec. 16.

Angela Craig, 43, died in March 2023 of poisoning from cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, the latter a substance found in over-the-counter eye drops, according to the coroner. The couple had been married for 23 years and had six children together.

Craig was also previously charged with smuggling a letter out of jail with an inmate bonded out by an adult daughter. It asked her to make a fake video of Angela Craig asking Craig to get poisons for her, according to prosecutors.

He is also accused of asking another inmate to plant forged journal entries at the Craig home suggesting that Angela Craig killed herself. The inmate declined, according to court documents. Craig’s original defense team pointed out that the inmate only contacted authorities after an initial hearing to review the evidence in the case, which was widely covered by the media.

Prosecutors also allege Craig tried a more elaborate and convoluted approach to put the blame on his wife. In court documents, they said he asked another former fellow inmate to find attractive women who would agree to testify at his trial that they had affairs with him and, after Angela Craig found out, they had refused to help her frame him.

Police have called James Craig’s alleged plot a “heinous, complex and calculated murder.”

Three of Jim and Angela Craig’s six children are living with James Craig’s brother, “48 Hours” reported earlier this year. The other three are now adults living on their own, including their daughter Mira. On Mother’s Day 2023, Mira wrote this message on social media: “as of tomorrow my mom will be two months gone. I haven’t the words to express the heartache my siblings and I feel every day.”

Mira’s last words in that post: “I love you so much mama” … “we miss you.”

A hiker was found alive this week in the remote wilderness of northwestern Canada, where he had been lost for more than six weeks, authorities said.

Sam Benastick was initially reported missing on Oct. 19 after failing to return from a backcountry trip in Redfern-Kiely Provincial Park, an isolated landscape known for its alpine tundra and stark mountainscape in the northern Rockies of British Columbia. Two men spotted Benastick Tuesday on their way to the park’s Redfern Lake trail for work, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Recognizing him as the missing hiker, they took Benastick to a hospital.

Benastick told police he had stayed in his car for a couple of days at the start of his backcountry trip, before walking to a mountainside creek and camping there for 10 or 15 days, the RCMP said. At that point, the hiker said he moved to a different location farther down into the valley and a built a camp and shelter in a dried-out creek bed. Eventually, Benastick found his way to the road where he encountered the Redfern Lake trail employees, well over six weeks after he first set out on his journey.

“Finding Sam alive is the absolute best outcome. After all the time he was missing, it was feared that this was would not be the outcome,” said Corporal Madonna Saunderson, a spokesperson for the RCMP in British Columbia, in a statement.

Benastick, 20, survived extraordinarily harsh conditions. When he was found, the hiker was using two walking sticks to support himself and had cut his sleeping back to wrap the fabric around his legs for warmth, the Canadian broadcaster CBC News reported. Temperatures in the park were frigid while he was missing, at times dropping to -20 degrees Celsius, or -4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to BBC News, a CBS News partner.

“Those are very difficult conditions for really anyone to survive in, especially [with] limited supplies and equipment and food,” Prince George Search and Rescue search manager Adam Hawkins told the BBC.

Mike Reid, the general manager of the inn near Redfern-Kiely Provincial Park where Benastick’s family stayed as search efforts got underway in October, told CBC News that Benastick was in “rough shape” Tuesday. But he is expected to recover.

Authorities initiated a massive search for Benastick when the missing person report for him was filed, but that search was called off at the end of October, BBC News reported. Police said they intend to gather more information about what happened to the hiker and why he remained missing for so long once Benastick’s health has improved.