160 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 160 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
It sits in Edina, Minnesota, and was designed to keep shoppers at 75°F year-round through the state's brutal winters.
Q 02Which Austrian-born architect designed Southdale Center and pioneered the enclosed regional mall in 1956?
Victor Gruen
He later came to loathe what his idea became, decrying the 'land wasting seas of parking' that surrounded suburban malls.
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
The invention eventually made Goldman a multimillionaire, though shoppers initially wanted nothing to do with it.
Q 06Sylvan Goldman built his first shopping cart prototype by adding a basket and wheels to what?
A wooden folding chair
Men thought the carts looked effeminate and women said they resembled baby carriages, so at first almost nobody used them.
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
The NCR register rang up 67 cents, and a facsimile of the gum 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
The friendlier 'in the black' accounting explanation only took hold by the 1980s, long after the police coined the phrase.
Q 09Which organisation coined the term 'Cyber Monday' in a 2005 press release?
The National Retail Federation
The name came from the observation that workers returned from Thanksgiving weekend to fast office internet connections and bought what they had window-shopped.
Q 10Singles' Day, the world's biggest shopping day, falls on which date?
11 November
The date was picked because the numeral 1 looks like a bare stick, a symbol for unattached people; in 2025 it generated more than US$150 billion in sales.
Q 11Long before Alibaba turned it into a shopping bonanza in 2009, Singles' Day originated in 1993 where?
Nanjing University
It began as a tongue-in-cheek celebration for bachelors before spreading to other campuses and eventually the whole country.
Q 12What was Amazon's original 1994 name, dropped after a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'?
Cadabra
He also liked that a name starting with 'A' would land near the top of alphabetical lists.
Q 13The first book ever sold on Amazon.com was 'Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies' by which author?
Douglas Hofstadter
The subtitle was 'Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought', which is not exactly beach reading.
Q 21Costco's hot dog and soda combo has been sold at the same price since 1985. What is it?
$1.50
The quarter-pound all-beef dog comes with a 20-ounce drink and free refills.
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 23The I and K in IKEA are founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials. What do the E and A stand for?
The farm and village where he grew up
Q 14When Amazon Prime launched in 2005, what was the flat annual fee for free two-day shipping?
$79
The price rose to $99 in 2014, and by April 2021 Prime had 200 million subscribers worldwide.
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
The story was invented purely to get journalists interested in the young auction site, and it worked for decades.
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 the same year. Which year?
1962
Sam Walton's first Wal-Mart Discount City opened in Rogers, Arkansas, that July; Target debuted in Roseville, Minnesota, and Kmart in Garden City, Michigan.
Q 19Roughly how many people does Walmart employ, making it the world's largest private employer?
2.1 million
It is also the second-largest company on Earth by revenue and sits at number one on the Fortune 500.
Q 20Before Walmart, Sam Walton ran a franchise of which variety-store chain in Newport, Arkansas?
Ben Franklin
He bought it with a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law plus $5,000 saved from his Army pay, and lost the lease five years later.
Elmtaryd was the family farm and Agunnaryd the nearby village in Småland; the company has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008.
Q 24How old was Ingvar Kamprad when he founded IKEA as a mail-order business in 1943?
17
He started it at his uncle Ernst's kitchen table and did not add furniture to the range until 1948.
Q 25When Harrods unveiled England's first escalator in 1898, what were nervous customers offered at the top?
Brandy
Shop staff also dispensed smelling salts to anyone unsettled 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
Christian's joyful reunion with the pair years later became one of the internet's first viral animal videos.
Q 27Which retail slogan is usually credited to Harry Gordon Selfridge or his old boss Marshall Field?
The customer is always right
Selfridge is also credited with the catchphrase 'Only ___ shopping days until Christmas'.
Q 28What did John Logie Baird first publicly demonstrate at Selfridges in April 1925?
Moving images by television
The store had form for spectacle: in 1909 it displayed Louis Blériot's Channel-crossing monoplane, drawing 150,000 people in four days.
Q 29Émile Zola's novel 'Au Bonheur des Dames' was inspired by which pioneering Paris department store?
Le Bon Marché
Aristide Boucicaut turned it into the model of the modern department store, and Gustave Eiffel's engineering firm helped expand it in 1872.
Q 30On which Paris department store's roof did pilot Jules Védrines land a plane in 1919?
Galeries Lafayette
The Boulevard Haussmann flagship is better known for its glass-and-steel dome and Art Nouveau staircases, finished in 1912.