Shopping Malls Trivia
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60 free Shopping Malls trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The enclosed shopping mall was invented by a socialist Viennese architect who wanted to give American suburbs a town square and spent his last years disowning what developers did with it. This quiz starts with the ancestors: the Passage du Caire in Paris, the Burlington Arcade, the Galleria in Milan, Kansas City's Country Club Plaza, and the world's first fully enclosed mall in Lulea, Sweden. Then Victor Gruen, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, Frank Lloyd Wright's sniffy review, the Bergen Mall, the Gruen transfer, Taubman's carpet-free floors and the first food courts. The second half is the giants and the ghosts: Mall of America and its indoor theme park, West Edmonton Mall's wave pool and roller coaster, Dubai Mall's 105 million visitors, Iran Mall's record concrete pour, King of Prussia, Gateshead's Metrocentre and the Trafford Centre, the retail apocalypse and dead malls, the mall that inspired Dawn of the Dead, and the free-speech case that reached the US Supreme Court. Easy questions ask what a food court is; the expert tier asks for dates, square footage and architects. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on shopping malls, Victor Gruen, Southdale Center, Mall of America, West Edmonton Mall, Dubai Mall and related pages, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on architecture, retail brands and the 1980s.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of retailer traditionally anchors a shopping mall?
Department stores
Department stores. Their powerful brand names and heavy advertising generate the foot traffic, and the whole point of a mall is to let smaller shops share in it.
Q 02The word 'mall' comes from pall-mall, an old alley game that most resembled which modern one?
Croquet
Croquet. Pall-mall players drove a wooden ball down an alley and through an iron hoop; London's alley became a tree-lined walk called The Mall, and the name later passed to shopping promenades.
Q 03A shopping centre that has lost its anchor stores and most of its shoppers is popularly known as what?
A dead mall
A dead mall. When the big stores leave, the foot traffic they drew goes with them, so sales fall at nearly every remaining shop and the rents can no longer pay for the building's upkeep.
Q 04What do Americans call a single row of shops with parking directly in front and no indoor walkway?
A strip mall
A strip mall. Shoppers can park at the door of the shop they want, a convenience that had visits to strip malls rising in the early 2020s even as many enclosed malls struggled to keep their customers.
Q 05Which city's covered shopping passages, the oldest survivors dating from the 1790s, were forerunners of the modern mall?
Paris
Paris. One of its oldest surviving passages, the Passage du Caire, was named in tribute to Napoleon's campaign in Egypt; shoppers valued such passages as shelter from the weather and the filthy streets.
Q 06Which London shopping arcade, opened in 1819, is still patrolled by top-hatted guards called Beadles?
Burlington Arcade
Burlington Arcade. Its Beadles still enforce a ban on whistling, once a signal between pickpockets, though Sir Paul McCartney is officially excused.
Q 07Which Italian city's glass-roofed Galleria, beside its Duomo, gave the word 'galleria' to shopping malls worldwide?
Milan
Milan. Visitors to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II spin three times on one heel on a floor mosaic of a bull for luck, wearing a hole that the city has had to repair more than once.
Q 08Often called America's oldest indoor mall, a Greek Revival arcade built in 1828 stands in which New England state capital?
Providence
Providence. After years of decline, the Arcade reopened in 2013 with small shops on the ground floor and 48 micro-loft apartments on the two floors above.
Q 09Which Missouri city's Country Club Plaza, built in the 1920s, is considered the first suburban shopping centre planned for drivers?
Kansas City
Kansas City. Sceptics dubbed the scheme Nichols' Folly, but developer Jesse Clyde Nichols built it to resemble Seville, with imported fountains and mosaics, and the shoppers came.
Q 10A 1955 mall named simply 'Shopping', often called the world's first indoor one, stands near the Arctic Circle in which country?
Sweden
Sweden. Its British-born architect designed the mall in Luleå so that city life could move indoors through the long northern winter.
Q 11Which American visionary studied mall designer Victor Gruen's ideas when planning his own model city of the future?
Walt Disney
Walt Disney. Repelled by the motels and billboards that sprang up around Disneyland, he read Gruen while planning EPCOT as a real city with residents; after his death it was built as a theme park instead.
Q 12Southdale Center, widely credited as America's first enclosed, climate-controlled mall, opened in 1956 in a suburb of which city?
Minneapolis
Minneapolis. In suburban Edina, Victor Gruen roofed over a 'garden court of perpetual spring' with a fishpond and a tall cage of songbirds, so that shopping no longer depended on Minnesota's weather.
Q 13Which architect said in 1956 that Southdale's garden court had 'all the evils of the village street and none of its charm'?
Q 21Which mall fixture did developer James Rouse pioneer in the 1970s, after his first attempt in Pennsylvania flopped?
The food court
The food court. His 1971 version at Plymouth Meeting Mall was judged too small and too samey, but the one that opened at Paramus Park in 1974 is credited as America's first success; Rouse pictured them as community picnics.
Q 22Which Chicago skyscraper on the Magnificent Mile became the city's first 'vertical mall', with eight floors of shops at its base?
Water Tower Place
Water Tower Place. Shoppers rode its glass elevators through eight floors, but after its last anchor closed in 2021 the owner decided to cut the mall back to the bottom three.
Q 23In which 1985 film does a shopping mall's name change from Twin Pines to Lone Pine partway through?
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright. He toured the new mall and was just as scathing about other new buildings nearby, but developers ignored him and copied Southdale across America.
Q 14Victor Gruen, who invented the American mall, fled which city when the Nazis took it over in 1938?
Vienna
Vienna. He reached New York speaking no English, was designing Fifth Avenue boutiques within a year, and meant his malls to bring the urban life of his home city to America's suburbs.
Q 15Victor Gruen designed the first outdoor pedestrian mall in the United States, opened in 1959 in which Michigan city?
Kalamazoo
Kalamazoo. Many American downtowns copied its car-free Burdick Street, but most of those pedestrian malls later vanished, and Kalamazoo itself reopened half of its mall to traffic.
Q 16How did Victor Gruen come to regard the suburban malls that copied his design?
As a betrayal of his ideas
As a betrayal of his ideas. He had planned malls as town centres ringed by homes, schools and parks, and in 1978 he refused, in his words, to 'pay alimony' for such 'bastard developments'.
Q 17The 'Gruen transfer' is the moment a mall's design turns a shopper with a list into what?
An impulse buyer
An impulse buyer. Fountains, music and tempting displays are arranged so that someone who came in for socks leaves with a new shirt too, an effect named after the mall pioneer Victor Gruen.
Q 18Which state's Bergen County, home of the 1957 Bergen Mall, has one of America's last bans on Sunday shopping?
New Jersey
New Jersey. Its counties were allowed to drop the old blue laws from the 1950s, but Bergen, a mecca for malls, voted to keep its ban, so giants like Garden State Plaza go dark every Sunday.
Q 19Mall developer Alfred Taubman called which feature a shopper's only direct contact with the building?
The floor
The floor. He laid small stone tiles so that thin-soled shoes would grip, and scorned the carpet some rivals used, saying it creates friction.
Q 20Which Chinese-American fast-food chain began in 1983 as a single counter in California's Glendale Galleria mall?
Panda Express
Panda Express. The mall's owners, regulars at Andrew Cherng's Panda Inn restaurant, asked him for a quick-service version, and its chef later invented orange chicken at a Hawaii branch.
Back to the Future
Back to the Future. Marty knocks down one of the two pines on a ranch when he arrives in 1955, so the mall later built there has a different name when he gets home; it was filmed at California's Puente Hills Mall.
Q 24What made 2007 a landmark year in the decline of the American shopping mall?
No new indoor mall opened
No new indoor mall opened, the first such year in half a century, down from about 140 a year in the mid-1990s. Developers had built far more malls than shoppers could fill.
Q 25Which Netflix series rebuilt part of a dying Georgia mall as the 1985 Starcourt Mall for its third season?
Stranger Things
Stranger Things. Gwinnett Place Mall near Atlanta, once the leading mall in its region, was on life support with gaping empty units when the crew restored a wing to its 1980s look in 2018.
Q 26Which 1980 comedy staged a police car chase through the real, recently closed Dixie Square Mall near Chicago?
The Blues Brothers
The Blues Brothers. The chase did real damage to the building, which had failed after little more than a decade as a mall, and it was left to decay for some thirty years before it was demolished in 2012.
Q 27Which company opened a warehouse in 2018 on the site of Ohio's Randall Park Mall, once billed as the world's largest?
Amazon
Amazon. The mall opened in 1976 calling itself the world's largest shopping centre and closed in 2009; the online retailer that helped empty such malls now ships parcels from the same ground.
Q 28The Supreme Court's 1980 Pruneyard Shopping Center ruling concerned what issue inside a California mall?
Free speech
Free speech. High-school students collecting signatures for a petition had been told to leave, and the Court let California protect such campaigning even inside a privately owned mall.
Q 29A plaque in Mall of America's theme park marks which spot on the Twins' old baseball diamond?
Home plate
Home plate. The mall replaced Metropolitan Stadium, where the Twins and Vikings played until 1981, and a red seat mounted high on a wall marks where Harmon Killebrew's longest home run landed.
Q 30Mall of America is in which Minnesota suburb?
Bloomington
Bloomington. When the Twins and Vikings left its stadium for a new dome downtown, the suburb was left with a huge empty site beside the airport, and filled it with the mall.