Shopping Trivia
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158 free Shopping trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 158 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
Southdale Center opened in October 1956 in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in America.
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
The mall was loosely modeled on the covered arcades of crowded European cities, an inspiration Wright clearly did not admire.
Q 04Piggly Wiggly, opened by Clarence Saunders in 1916, is remembered as the first grocery store to do what?
Let customers serve themselves
Saunders patented the 'self-serving store' concept the following year, and later experimented with a fully automated shop called the Keedoozle.
Q 05In what year did Oklahoma grocer Sylvan Goldman introduce the shopping cart to his Humpty Dumpty stores?
1937
Goldman rolled out the first carts at his Humpty Dumpty stores in Oklahoma City on 4 June 1937; shoppers shunned them until he hired people to push them around the aisles.
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 ever scanned with a UPC barcode at a retail checkout, on 26 June 1974?
A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum
A 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, ringing up 67 cents; the pack later went on display at the Smithsonian.
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's Shop.org arm coined 'Cyber Monday' in a 28 November 2005 press release, noting workers back from Thanksgiving used fast office connections to buy what they had browsed.
Q 10Singles' Day, China's giant annual online shopping festival, falls on which date?
11 November
Singles' Day is 11 November, written 11/11 because the numeral 1 resembles a bare stick for unattached people; Alibaba turned the student holiday into a shopping festival in 2009.
Q 11Long before Alibaba turned it into a shopping bonanza in 2009, Singles' Day originated in 1993 where?
Nanjing University
Singles' Day began in 1993 among male students in a Nanjing University dormitory as a joke holiday for bachelors, spreading to other campuses before Alibaba commercialised it in 2009.
Q 12What was Amazon's original 1994 name, dropped after a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'?
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 13The first book ever sold on Amazon.com was 'Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies' by which author?
Q 21Costco set what price for its hot dog and soda combo in 1985?
$1.50
The combo was priced at $1.50 in 1985 for a quarter-pound all-beef hot dog and a soda with free refills; co-founder Jim Sinegal famously told his successor he would kill him if he raised it.
Q 22Costco's house brand, Kirkland Signature, takes its name from what?
The city of its original headquarters
The brand launched in 1995, when the company was still based in Kirkland, Washington, before moving to Issaquah.
Q 23IKEA's I and K are Ingvar Kamprad's initials; what do the E and A stand for?
The farm and village where he grew up
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist behind 'Gödel, Escher, Bach', wrote the book Amazon sold to John Wainwright in April 1995; its subtitle was 'Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought'.
Q 14When Amazon Prime launched in 2005, what was the flat annual fee for free two-day shipping?
$79
Prime launched in February 2005 at $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping; the fee rose to $99 in 2014 and to $119 in 2018.
Q 15What was the first item ever sold on eBay, back when it was still called AuctionWeb in 1995?
A broken laser pointer
It fetched $14.83 from a buyer who assured Pierre Omidyar he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 16A PR manager invented the tale that eBay began so Omidyar's fiancée could trade which collectible?
Pez dispensers
PR manager Mary Lou Song concocted the 1997 tale that eBay was built so Pierre Omidyar's fiancée Pam could trade Pez dispensers; the myth hooked journalists and persisted for years.
Q 17The name 'eBay' is a shortening of what?
Echo Bay
Omidyar wanted echobay.com, but a gold-mining company called Echo Bay Mines already owned the domain.
Q 18Walmart, Target and Kmart all opened their first stores in which year?
1962
All three debuted in 1962: Kmart in suburban Detroit in March, Target in Roseville, Minnesota, in May, and Sam Walton's first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas, that July.
Q 19Walmart'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 20Before 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.
The E and A stand for Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Agunnaryd, the nearby village in Småland where Kamprad grew up; he registered the name in 1943.
Q 24How old was Ingvar Kamprad when he founded IKEA as a mail-order business in 1943?
17
Kamprad, born in March 1926, was 17 when he registered IKEA in July 1943 at his uncle Ernst's kitchen table; he only began selling home furnishings in 1948.
Q 25When Harrods unveiled England's first escalator in 1898, what were nervous customers offered at the top?
Brandy
Harrods installed England's first escalator in November 1898; attendants at the top offered brandy and smelling salts to shoppers unnerved by the 'moving staircase'.
Q 26What 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 27Which 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' is attributed to Harry Gordon Selfridge, who had worked under Marshall Field before opening Selfridges on Oxford Street in 1909; Field himself is also sometimes credited.
Q 28What did John Logie Baird publicly demonstrate at Selfridges in 1925?
Moving images by television
Baird showed moving silhouette images by television to Selfridges shoppers over three weeks from 25 March 1925; in 1909 the store had drawn 150,000 people in four days with Louis Blériot's Channel-crossing monoplane.
Q 29Émile Zola's novel 'Au Bonheur des Dames' was inspired by which pioneering Paris department store?
Le Bon Marché
Le Bon Marché, run by Aristide Boucicaut from 1852, was the model for Zola's fictional store; its 1870s expansion on rue de Sèvres involved Gustave Eiffel's engineering firm.
Q 30On which Paris department store's roof did pilot Jules Védrines land a plane in 1919?
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.