The group goes to a New Jersey shopping mall for cheap air conditioners, but Kramer alone gets the last one. Leaving, they are stranded in the multi-level parking garage in search of Kramer's car. Elaine needs to get her new goldfish home, George is due to chaperone his parents for their wedding anniversary, and Jerry, having failed to find a bathroom, needs to urinate. After many false sightings of the car, they lose both direction and hope. Struggling to carry the air conditioner, Kramer stows it behind a random car.
Elaine's fish are succumbing to suffocation, but her pleas to hitch rides with random strangers to search for Kramer's car fall on deaf ears. Jerry is disgusted by Kramer's suggestion to urinate discreetly in the garage, but grows desperate enough to do so, and is caught by a security guard, leaving the others to search for both him and the car. Jerry makes up outlandish excuses for his misdemeanor, claiming to suffer the fictional, deadly disease of "uromysitisis", and passing off George's predicament—embellished unbelievably—as his own. Thanks to Jerry's lies, when George, too, is caught peeing on Kramer's advice, the same guard disbelieves his story.
After being fined, Jerry and George reunite with Elaine, whose aggravation at apathetic bystanders nearly draws the ire of two bodybuilders. George is persuaded to hitch a ride with an attractive woman as a chat-up line, and succeeds. She graciously chauffeurs the group, but George unwittingly offends her belief in Scientology and she throws them out—next to Kramer's car, by chance, but with Kramer still missing. Finally retrieving his air conditioner, Kramer arrives much too late to salvage Elaine's fish or George's obligations. They all get in the car, but the engine fails to start.