Best vending machine locator in Arkansas, by the numbers

What is on the record for Arkansas?

Two venues in different halves of the state, signed three and a half weeks apart in mid-2026.

The incompleteness is typical rather than unusual: 69 of the 87 listings report a visitor count, so 18 do not, and Pine Bluff is one of them. A state with two listings and one traffic figure is at 50% reporting, against 79% across the record.

Their geography is worth noting as a measure of reach. Fort Smith sits on the Oklahoma line in the northwest; Pine Bluff is in the southeast Delta. A locator that signed both was not working a single corner of the state.

Why do the two Arkansas venues differ by ten points?

Because they are different kinds of building, and that — not geography, not size, not the month they signed — is what sets the share across this entire dataset.

Sorting all 81 placements that set a share by venue category produces two clean groups. Every pass-through venue was paid 50% of net: shops, malls, electronics stores, delis, forecourts. Destination venues — bowling alleys, indoor playgrounds, family entertainment centres, trampoline parks — were paid 40%, sometimes 30%, with one exception in Kansas.

Arkansas contains one of each, which makes it the smallest state dataset in which the split is visible without reference to the national table. The inversion is the interesting part: dwell-time venues are worth more to a machine and accept less of each sale, as what the revenue-share data shows tests across all 87.

How busy is the venue that reports?

Above its type’s median by a clear margin. The Fort Smith bowling alley gives 190 visitors a day against a median of 137 across the 16 counted bowling alleys nationally.

Fort Smith therefore offers about 39% more captive time than the median bowling alley while agreeing exactly the same 40% share. The 2.7-hour visit length behind that comes from Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use data, applied the way our ranking of vending locations sets out.

Pine Bluff cannot be placed on that scale at all. Without a visitor count there is no visitor-hours figure, and electronics stores have no published visit length in any case, so its 50% share sits in the table unexplained by traffic.

What can two listings not tell you?

Most of what an operator would want. Two placements give no distribution, so there is no Arkansas range to speak of beyond the two points themselves, and no basis for saying what a third venue would agree.

They also say nothing about outcomes. No listing in the record reports sales, in Arkansas or anywhere, so a share and a traffic count are inputs rather than results. And the snapshot captures signatures in one season: a machine signed in June and removed in September would appear here unchanged.

What the two do support is narrow and useful — that venues of those two types in this state agreed those terms on those dates. For a venue owner or an operator negotiating in Arkansas, two local reference points beat a national median, which is more than 21 states can offer at all; vending machine locations by state shows who has what.

What is missing from Arkansas’s record?

The categories that carry the national dataset. Arkansas shows a bowling alley and a retail store; it shows no indoor playground, family entertainment centre, trampoline park or arcade, and those four plus bowling account for 55 of the 87 placements.

Little Rock, Fayetteville and Jonesboro have all of those businesses, so the gap reflects where a sales effort reached rather than what Arkansas contains. Reading it any other way would make the same mistake this record invites in every state with a short list.