ARTIST’S rendering of the Bolsa Pacific project to replace Westminster Mall (Shopoff Realty).

If you track reader interest in the articles that appear on a news-site (as I do), you get a pretty good idea of what interests the casual reader.

The number one topic tends to be crime and/or disaster. Times may change, fashions may become fantastic but readership spikes with stories of crime, car crashes and canoodling (amorousness, ranging from garden-variety to romance of the shoes-off variety, with or without the benefit of clergy).

What’s in second place may surprise you. It’s shopping.

Shopping for groceries. For a place to dine. For a place to buy stuff cheap. A place to buy nice stuff to impress other people. A place to get away from it all. A place to meet other people.

What the future of retail shopping looks like is on my mind as the last walls of the defunct Westminster Mall come down. It’s being replaced by Bolsa Pacific, which is described as a mixed-use “park”-style center with lots of housing, some shopping, open space, an even a hotel.

The “park”-style center is the latest concept in that segment of the economy. But there’s no agreement among “experts” over what retail will look like in the near-future. A perusal of speculation online turns up these nominees for “the next big thing.”

Amazon and the Many Dwarfs: Under this theory the proliferation of online shopping will accelerate. A typical shopping center will consist of an Amazon-like distribution center doubling as a catalog store, surrounded by local shops offering sandwiches, dry cleaning, pet-grooming, etc., i.e., service stuff.

Experiential Shopping: A place you go to do stuff, such as jump on trampolines, watch exciting 5-D movies, play pickleball and generally interact with other folks while – or after– sweating. Such places would also sell exercise clothing and food to reward you for all that jumping around.

The Shrunk Mall: I, personally, tend to be a Target-Tortolano, grinning as they get bigger and bigger. But there’s another trend and that’s to build smaller department stores where the 20 most popular categories of goods are sold. The idea is that the cost of building and maintaining a 100,000 square foot store to (theoretically) serve an area with 500,000 people is excessive, and it would be more efficient to build 25,000-square foot stores in smaller cities and in downtown areas.

There are other ideas floating around, and maybe the best bet is something no one has figured out yet. But when it does surface, you’ll be able to read about it here, because we know you would love to find about it when it;s about to come to your neighborhood.