From the environs of the corner of Imperial Highway and Beach Boulevard to the environs of the…read morecorner of Imperial Highway and Idaho Street, there are least six (and possibly seven) large strip malls. In today's commercial-real-estate parlance, at least four of those strip malls can be considered power centers.
Westridge Plaza lies at the southeast corner of the intersection of Imperial Highway and Beach Boulevard. It's the strip mall in the area that extends the farthest south. It's neither the newest nor the oldest of the strip malls, but it has steadily grown from that random place with a Staples and a Sam's Club to quite the destination for (mostly) big-chain shopping. As its popularity has grown, so has the traffic turning south from Imperial onto Beach and then immediately getting into the first of two left-turn lanes to enter the large parking lot. If you're already headed south on Beach Boulevard, the fastest (though not the most efficient) way to get to Westridge Plaza is to turn left onto Imperial from the second left-turn lane and then immediately right into the easy-to-miss driveway that goes in front of Staples. Do not turn in to the Chevron station. Although it's technically within Westridge Plaza, there is absolutely no access from its apron into the parking lot.
As with most strip malls these days, the large anchor stores are farthest from the street, while the smaller stores are located in unconnected buildings dispersed throughout the parking lot. There are quite a few different restaurants. Most of them are chains, but some of them are local small businesses. When you consider all six (or seven) strip malls in the area, there's a surprisingly wide variety of food available even though the vast majority of retail square footage is dedicated to big-box stores.
I mainly come here to use Wescom Credit Union's ATMs, but if both of those are occupied (which happens more often than one would think) I can easily use a SchoolsFirst Credit Union ATM in the same building. In fact, that one building also has a (for-profit) bank, so it's ATM central.
The driving lanes in the parking lot are needlessly confusing. Because the frontages of the big-box stores run along an angle, they couldn't have maintained a parallel grid for all the parking spots, but their "solution" of aligning each individual building's parking spots with it causes all kinds of problems, as the five or six separate alignments intersect in all kinds of strange configurations, and people drive really fast through the lanes. Especially near the northern end of the parking lot, be very careful that the lane you're using actually allows you easy access to the building you're trying to get to; there are hedges and curbs that makes being physically close to a given building a totally different thing from being "driving close" to that same building.
There's enough parking that you'll always find a spot, but it might not be super close to where you're going, especially around the holidays.
