Teams of contestants answer trivia questions before competing in a timed race to gather grocery items from the aisles of a supermarket.
Beginning on November 20, 2000, the show moved to NBC Studios, with that series' set modeled after a Unified Western Market.
In the first round of the game, one contestant from each team was shown a grocery item and asked to guess its retail price.
Similar to the original version, all three teams started with a base time of one minute and 30 seconds.
Occasionally, questions centered around pop culture, movies, or stories found in checkstand tabloids.
For the Lifetime and PAX versions, the most common format featured a brand or product name that had its letters scrambled.
On some episodes of the Lifetime version, an alternate format was used that omitted the word scramble; instead, the host would offer five clues.
Instead of buzzing-in, the teams discussed the clue and each sent one member into the market to find the correct item.
The "Big Sweep" was the chance for the teams to run throughout the supermarket and take products from the shelves with the seconds they had earned in the front game.
At any time, runners could bring full carts back to their partners' checkout counters and exchange them for empty ones.
With the exception of certain bonuses, items had to be in a team's cart (either the runner's current one, or a full one already delivered to the checkout) when time ran out in order to count toward their total.
The three main rules for the Big Sweep were: The five-item limit was absent in the original ABC version of the show, but was added to prevent a team from overloading their carts with expensive items, such as poultry, laundry detergent or over-the-counter drugs.
During most episodes of the first season, costumed characters such as Frankenstein's monster, a gorilla, or a creature named Mr. Yuck ran through the aisles during the Sweep.
The one constant throughout the entire run of the second series was a group of giant "bonus" items (these included stuffed animals, advertising signs and inflatable displays of products) placed throughout the market in plain sight.
Each runner could take only one bonus, and its value was added to the team's total only if it was returned to the checkout counter before time ran out.
The first such method employed was called the Shopping List, where teams could earn an extra $250 for bringing three (originally four) specific grocery items back during the course of the Big Sweep ($500 in the 2020 version).
Over the years, more variations on that theme would be used; for instance, the teams might be asked to fulfill a bread order or retrieve magazines.
The initial rules and time limit were the same as for the Bonus Sweep, but the prize for finding all three items was $25,000.
The team had to decide whether to "cash out," ending the round and keeping the $25,000, or trade it for an additional 20 seconds on the clock to find a fourth item worth $50,000 and tagged with another envelope.
If successful, they could either cash out or trade the money for another 15 seconds to find a fifth and final item, worth $100,000 and tagged with an oversized gold bill in that amount.
If the team chose to continue the round after finding the third or fourth item, the clock restarted as soon as they opened the envelope containing the next clue.
From 2021 to 2022, the team was given 90 seconds to find five items, each of which increased their Bonus Sweep winnings if found ($5,000, $10,000, $25,000, $50,000, and $100,000).
If time ran out, the team won the money for the last item found in addition to their Big Sweep total.
On October 13, 2017, it was announced that Fremantle had acquired the global rights to the format and that a new version of the show was in the works.
Fremantle stated that the new incarnation of the show would incorporate "modern technology" into the program to reflect 21st-century shopping habits.