hey, i wanna do a mall scavenger hunt..what kinda things can i have people find? i need some things that could cost like close to nothing (i wanna giv them like 10 dollars to begin with) and i need things taht they could find/do for free.THANKS!!

Maybe u could like ahve a contest like who can buy the most stuff wit 10 dollarss or something.

Hi! We just had a mall scavenger hunt bday party for my 12 yr old this past summer. I gave each team 10$ and a list of 10 tasks to perform.

I went to the mall a couple times ahead of the party and scoped out the things I wanted them to purchase.

~Car antenna topper from the Disney store (gave to the adults who were helping me w/ the party as a token of thanks)
~Dollar tree item. I picked something they had to look for.
~$5.00 gift certificate to my daughters favorite store (as a birthday present for her)

Then some of the tasks they had to do were:
~stop in front of the Target store and say "Welcome to Walmart". This was especially funny when one woman looked up to see if she which store she really was at.
~Ask someone (in the singsongy voice) "What would you do for a Klondike bar"
~Everytime the paths crossed between one team and the birthday girl, they had to stop and sing Happy Birthday as loud as they could.
~Take the elevators to the top and ride them back down.
~Stop at Pretzel Time and figure out how much 3 certain food items added up to.
~First team back to headquarters (located in the food court where friends were helping/waiting) had a small token waiting for them.
~Penalties included running off without the adult, being rude to other shoppers, & things like that. The penalty was one minute waiting in place where they are.

I also wrote all my questions in quiz/riddle mode.. lol. It was fun and I made it so they had about 7 stores to visit (which timed out at about an hour). We met back at the food court and they had a Subway Party sub for lunch.

Hope this helps some!

Did you have one adult for each team? How many kids were in a team? How did you decide what team the birthday girl/boy should be on? What kind of small tokens/presents did you give to winning team? Please email me, I am playing a 13th bday party for my daughter in June.

Wow - I just read the other post about what they did and am so impressed!
The thing I was going to suggest is if you could borrow enough polaroid cameras and provide film (which may cost the $10) they wouldn't have to actually buy anything, they could just take a picture of another team member doing something goofy in front of that item.
Or if you just had the one polaroid camera, you could make it one of the "stops" with a helper, they could "use their token" to "check it out", shoot what they needed to, and when they return it they get another part of the puzzle to move on, thus they wouldn't keep it long. Now THAT would provide some funny memories, and back at home you could scan them all in and make copies for the friends to send in the thank you notes. (Dollar stores sometimes have the small photo albums which you may could afford to give everyone one after the event, all filled out with the pics, their thank you note, and a place to stash the invitation if they wanted to keep it. They could be decorated with stickers.
Another thing to do might be to put some glitter pens/metallic pens and colored paper in the car, precut to the right size (4x6 or 3 and 1/2 x 5) so during the trip to the mall and home, and everyone can write notes about what they expect or what they most enjoyed, or any stupid thing that comes to mind, then those can be included in the books. IF there's a specially good one, have it color copied for all of them.