Shopping Trivia
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150 free Shopping trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
67 free Shopping trivia questions with answers. Shopping has a stranger history than most people expect, and this quiz digs into it. Fifty questions cover the first self-service grocery store and the folding chair that became the shopping cart, the pack of chewing gum that was the first item ever scanned with a barcode, the department stores of Paris and London, the enclosed mall's Minnesota birthplace, and the origin stories behind Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Costco, IKEA, Zara and Alibaba. Sale days get their due too: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day and Singles' Day. The easy questions ask what Costco charges for a hot dog and where Dubai Mall sits; the hard ones want the first book sold on Amazon, what inspired the cash register's mechanism and which newspaper first printed 'retail therapy'. It suits pub quiz teams, retail workers who want to know their industry's lore, and anyone who has ever wondered why the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the stores, inventions and events involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 150 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed US shopping mall, opened in 1956 in a suburb of which metro area?
Minneapolis–Saint Paul
Minneapolis–Saint Paul has harsh winters and hot summers, which was the point: Southdale, in suburban Edina, put its shops under one roof with heating and air-conditioning for year-round comfort.
Q 02Which Austrian-born architect designed Southdale Center and pioneered the enclosed regional mall in 1956?
Victor Gruen
Victor Gruen, born in Vienna in 1903, designed Southdale Center; he later disowned the suburban mall, decrying the 'land-wasting seas of parking' that surrounded his idea.
Q 03Which architect said Southdale had 'all the evils of the village street and none of its charm'?
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright toured Southdale weeks after it opened in 1956 and asked, 'What is this, a railroad station or a bus station?'; its garden court still became the template for malls across America.
Q 04Piggly Wiggly, opened in Memphis in 1916, is remembered as the first grocery to do what?
Let customers serve themselves
Piggly Wiggly let customers serve themselves from open shelves instead of handing a list to a clerk; Clarence Saunders patented his 'self-serving store' layout in 1917.
Q 05How did Sylvan Goldman get wary shoppers to use his new shopping carts in 1937?
Hired models
Hired models did it: men and women of various ages wheeled carts through his Oklahoma City stores pretending to shop, and real customers soon followed.
Q 06Sylvan Goldman built his first shopping cart prototype by adding a basket and wheels to what?
A wooden folding chair
Goldman's prototype was a wooden folding chair with a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs; men thought the carts effeminate and women said they looked like baby carriages.
Q 07What was the first product scanned by UPC barcode at a checkout?
A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum
A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum rang up at 67 cents in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on 26 June 1974; a pack so small showed that a barcode could work on almost anything.
Q 08Who popularised 'Black Friday' for the day after Thanksgiving, describing the crowds and traffic?
Police in Philadelphia
Philadelphia police used 'Black Friday' in the early 1960s for the post-Thanksgiving crush of shoppers and traffic; the cheerier 'in the black' accounting story only spread in the 1980s.
Q 09Which organisation coined the term 'Cyber Monday' in a 2005 press release?
The National Retail Federation
The National Retail Federation coined 'Cyber Monday' through its Shop.org arm in a November 2005 press release, suggesting that people back at work after Thanksgiving shopped online over faster office connections.
Q 10Singles' Day, China's giant annual online shopping festival, falls on which date?
11 November
11 November is written 11/11, and each numeral 1 looks like a 'bare stick', Chinese slang for an unattached man; the day began as a bachelors' joke in the 1990s before retailers took it up.
Q 11Which Chinese company turned Singles' Day, once a campus joke for bachelors, into a shopping festival in 2009?
Alibaba
Alibaba's Daniel Zhang recast the day in 2009 as a 24-hour online sale; by 2019 it was being described as the world's biggest one-day shopping event.
Q 12What was Amazon's original 1994 name, dropped after a lawyer misheard it as something morbid?
Cadabra
Jeff Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra Inc. in July 1994; his lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver', and Bezos chose Amazon partly because a name starting with 'A' sat near the top of alphabetical lists.
Q 13Amazon Prime launched in 2005 with which perk for its $79 annual fee?
Two-day shipping
Q 21Costco's house brand, Kirkland Signature, takes its name from what?
The city of its former headquarters
The city of its former headquarters is Kirkland, Washington: the label launched in 1995, and a year later Costco moved to nearby Issaquah, so the name has outlived the address.
Q 22IKEA begins with Ingvar Kamprad's initials; what do the E and A stand for?
The farm and village where he grew up
The farm and village where he grew up were Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd in Småland; IKEA began there in 1943 as a mail-order business, and furniture joined its range only five years later.
Q 23Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA at 17 with money his father gave him for what?
Two-day shipping was what Prime sold at its 2005 launch; streaming films and TV were added only in 2011.
Q 14What was the first item ever sold on eBay, back when it was still called AuctionWeb in 1995?
A broken laser pointer
A broken laser pointer sold for $14.83; when Pierre Omidyar checked that the buyer knew it didn't work, the man replied that he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 15A PR manager invented the tale that eBay began so Omidyar's fiancée could trade which collectible?
Pez dispensers
Pez dispensers were a publicist's touch: eBay's PR manager made up the fiancée story in 1997 to interest reporters, and it stood until a 2002 book about the company revealed the truth.
Q 16The name 'eBay' is a shortening of what?
Echo Bay
Echo Bay Technology Group was Omidyar's consulting firm; he wanted echobay.com, but a gold-mining company, Echo Bay Mines, already had that address, so he shortened it.
Q 17Walmart, Kmart and which other discount chain all opened their first stores in 1962?
Target
Target opened in Roseville, Minnesota, in May 1962, weeks after the first full-size Kmart and two months before Sam Walton's first Wal-Mart; the Dayton department-store company launched it as a discount arm.
Q 18Walmart's home office is in which Arkansas city?
Bentonville
Walmart's home office is in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Sam Walton opened Walton's 5&10 on the town square in 1950; that original storefront became the Walmart Museum.
Q 19Before Walmart, Sam Walton ran a franchise of which variety-store chain in Newport, Arkansas?
Ben Franklin
Walton bought a Ben Franklin variety-store franchise in Newport in 1945 with a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law and $5,000 of Army savings, then lost the lease in 1950.
Q 20Which Costco food-court item cost $1.50 in both 1985 and 2024?
Hot dog combo
The hot dog combo, sold with a soda, had not gone up by 2024: when his future successor said it was losing money, co-founder Jim Sinegal reportedly told him, 'I will kill you. Figure it out.'
Good grades
Good grades earned him the cash, a reward for doing well at school; he was already a seasoned trader, having sold matches from the age of five.
Q 24When Harrods unveiled England's first escalator in 1898, what were nervous customers offered at the top?
Brandy
Brandy and smelling salts awaited shoppers at the top; the 'moving staircase' was really a sloping conveyor belt of woven leather, with no steps at all.
Q 25What did John Rendall and Ace Bourke buy from Harrods in 1969 and later release in Kenya?
A lion cub
The lion cub, named Christian, was bought from Harrods' pet department in 1969 and released in Kenya with George Adamson; footage of his 1971 reunion with the pair went viral decades later.
Q 26Which retail slogan is usually credited to Harry Gordon Selfridge or his old boss Marshall Field?
The customer is always right
'The customer is always right' was a novel promise when 'let the buyer beware' was the rule in shops; Selfridge had worked for Field in Chicago before opening his London store in 1909.
Q 27What did John Logie Baird publicly demonstrate at Selfridges in 1925?
Moving images by television
Moving images by television, mere silhouettes, were Baird's show for Selfridges shoppers over three weeks from 25 March 1925; the store loved such stunts and in 1909 had displayed Blériot's Channel-crossing plane.
Q 28Émile Zola's novel 'Au Bonheur des Dames' was inspired by which pioneering Paris department store?
Le Bon Marché
Le Bon Marché was Zola's model: there Aristide Boucicaut let customers return goods for an exchange or a refund.
Q 29Pilot Jules Védrines landed a plane in 1919 on the roof of which Paris department store, famed for its glass dome?
Galeries Lafayette
Védrines set his Caudron G.3 down on the Galeries Lafayette roof on 19 January 1919 to win a 25,000-franc prize; the store's Boulevard Haussmann dome dates from 1912.
Q 30Macy's red star logo comes from a tattoo R. H. Macy got while working as what?
A whaler
A whaler, the Emily Morgan, took Macy to sea at fifteen, and he came home with a red star tattoo; years later the star replaced his store's first emblem, a rooster.