Q 01/05

Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed US shopping mall, opened in 1956 in a suburb of which metro area?

A) Minneapolis–Saint Paul

B) Chicago–Naperville–Elgin

C) Detroit–Warren–Dearborn

D) Cleveland–Elyria–Lorain

Answer · why

A) 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 02/05

Which Austrian-born architect designed Southdale Center and pioneered the enclosed regional mall in 1956?

A) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

B) Victor Gruen

C) Richard Neutra

D) Eero Saarinen

Answer · why

B) Victor Gruen

He later came to loathe what his idea became, decrying the 'land wasting seas of parking' that surrounded suburban malls.

Q 03/05

Which architect said Southdale had 'all the evils of the village street and none of its charm'?

A) Le Corbusier

B) Philip Cortelyou Johnson

C) Frank Lloyd Wright

D) Walter Adolph Gropius

Answer · why

C) Frank Lloyd Wright

The mall was loosely modeled on the covered arcades of crowded European cities, an inspiration Wright clearly did not admire.

Q 04/05

Piggly Wiggly, opened by Clarence Saunders in 1916, is remembered as the first grocery store to do what?

A) Stay open twenty-four hours a day

B) Accept payment by credit card

C) Deliver groceries to the home

D) Let customers serve themselves

Answer · why

D) 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 05/05

In what year did Oklahoma grocer Sylvan Goldman introduce the shopping cart to his Humpty Dumpty stores?

A) 1937

B) 1948

C) 1955

D) 1966

Answer · why

A) 1937

The invention eventually made Goldman a multimillionaire, though shoppers initially wanted nothing to do with it.