A trip to the mall is used as a classroom demonstration to illustrate the fundamentals of separations without the need for chemicals or any chemistry background. Student volunteers are the "mixture", and depending on the shopping list they have been given, they spend varying amounts of time in the "stores" versus moving through and out of the "mall", as the instructor reads all of the possible shopping stops aloud. In less than 10 minutes, the students observe the separation of the "mixture" into distinct groups, see how this can be represented graphically, and may then apply the knowledge to chemical separations. (Contains 3 figures.)