Quinn finds about the Mall of the Millennium, which claims to be the world's second or third largest mall, so of course she wants to go to it. The only problem is that it's a hundred miles away from Lawndale, and Jake and Helen refuse to drive her to it. So it looks like Quinn will have to have to find another way to get there, or she won't be able to hold her head up in the Fashion Club. Oh, the tragedies of the shallow...

Later, in Daria's economics class, Ms. Bennet is talking about flow and drawing one of her famous indecipherable diagrams. She asks for a concrete example of flow, and after no one answers, she calls on Daria. Unfortunately, Daria's answer, "the mall," makes Bennet think of the Mall of the Millennium, and she decides that it would make a perfect field trip.

None of Daria or Jane's objections can dissuade her, so on Friday, they end up on an incredibly bumpy bus ride to the mall with the rest of the class. While on the bus, Bennet tries to give a lecture about the mall, Upchuck tries to get someone to model bikinis for him, and Brittany tries to get the class into the shopping spirit by doing a fabulous (okay, okay, more like fabulously horrible) cheer. None of the three are that successful.

When they finally get to the mall, Daria is quite sick of it all (in more than one way. Har-har.), and she ends up puking out of the mall tram. And so their field trip makes a great start.

Inside the mall, there are about twenty levels in a bunch of confusingly colour-coded sections, as well as a roller coaster running through the middle of the building, and they get pretty lost pretty fast. Even so, Bennet manages to locate the Fuzzy Wuzzy Wee Bits (an obvious parody of Beanie Babies) shop, which causes her to have a joy-fit. All loaded with Fuzzy Wuzzies, they find their way to a meeting with the mall executives and are quizzed over what they look for in a mall. While everyone else answers this extremely pressing question, Daria and Jane discover that they're being watched from the other side of a two-way mirror by a focus group for market research. Knowing this, Jodie blackmails the executives into giving each of the students a twenty-dollar merchandise coupon.

Then the class gets assignments such as observing shrinkage, the technical term for shoplifting, and the class divides into pairs. Daria and Jane's assignment, observing traffic at the food court, is quickly completed, and the two decide to sample the mall's cuisine.

Meanwhile, the Fashion Club had convinced a really strange looking guy to drive them to the Mall of the Millennium in exchange for letting him hang out with them. They decide that they need to do more community service, so they come up with a plan: to find a loser poster girl and make her look almost as good as them. They spot two perfect candidates in the food court and approach them from behind. When the two "losers" turn around, Quinn and Co. are rather shocked to find that they've chosen Daria and Jane! And not only do they refuse to be made-over, Daria threatens to tell Helen and Jake about Quinn skipping school to go to the mall unless she does all of Daria's chores for a month and gives them a ride back to Lawndale. Quinn grudgingly agrees, and they say they'll meet in an hour.

Jane decides to use her merchandise coupon, twenty dollars off at the Scizzor Wizard, to buy a new pair of scissors. However, when they get to the Scizzor Wizard, they discover that it's a haircut shop, not a scissor shop. Nonetheless, after they throughly freak out the stylist, she lets them exchange the coupon for money. Next, they go to the Doodad Shop, which Daria's coupon was from. They find that doodads are purposeless, worthless pieces of crap from looking in the store window, but go in all the same. Inside, they're greeted with a rather unwelcome surprise - Daria is their 10,000th customer, so she gets a bunch of doodads for free, plus her picture on a big sign outside the shop. (Next time you watch it, pay close attention to the frames where Daria's getting her picture taken - she's wearing glasses and has eyebrows. It looks pretty weird.) Needless to say, Daria isn't exactly thrilled.

Back in Lawndale, two weeks later, Helen and Jake decide that they were too rough on Quinn when they refused to drive her. So they inform Daria and Quinn that they're going to take them on a trip to the Mall of the Millennium! Not surprisingly, the Morgendorffer sisters aren't really excited by this prospect.