Shopping

Westside options: The Tacoma Mall will raise the curtain on its newest addition, a 100,000- square-foot “lifestyle” section, this weekend.

That addition to the ’60s-vintage mall will add seven specialty stores, a new Nordstrom department store and a BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse to the mall’s lineup. New merchants include BOSE, Coldwater Creek, The Walking Co. and Coach. Those stores will open Friday. They will join the AT&T Wireless store, which is already open. The old Nordstrom space will be replaced by five retail store spaces, said the mall’s marketing director. She expects that those spaces will be built and occupied within the next year.

Germ control: Retailers that provide shopping carts are increasingly looking to limit germ exposure for customers and their families.

Their strategies, which range from providing sanitary wipes to installing high-tech cart-cleaning systems, have been spurred, in part, by a series of studies that show bacteria on shopping carts is a potential health issue – especially for infants.

A ShopRite supermarket in Passaic, N.J., installed a push-through cleaning machine recently that sprays each shopping cart between uses with a misty peroxide solution to kill bacteria, according to Jim Kratowicz, president of PureCart Systems, the manufacturer of the machine.

Studies conducted in 2006 and 2007 found riding in a shopping cart beside meat and poultry is risky for infants under six months.

Doing so triples the chance they may contract salmonella and quadruples it for campylobacter, a diarrhea illness, according to Olga Henao, an epidemiologist for the CDC.Sanitary wipes for use on shopping carts have been available for years at many retailers. With public awareness rising, a growing number of entrepreneurs are developing products to clean the entire cart, said Daniel Butler, vice president of retail operations for the National Retail Federation in Washington.