Vending machine locations in Florida, by the numbers

What is on the record for Florida?

Six venues of six different types, signed across four months, with one reporting gap.

Five of six reporting traffic is a 83% rate, better than the record’s 79% average and much better than California’s 43% on seven listings. Florida is one of the more usable state records in the dataset.

Does traffic drive the share? Florida says no

Florida is the cleanest test of that question in the whole dataset, because its own range covers nearly all of the record’s, and the answer is that the relationship runs backwards.

The venue with 33 times the traffic of the quietest takes the larger share of each sale, not the smaller one. If share were negotiated on footfall you would expect the opposite, since a busy venue needs the machine less per visitor.

What actually sorts them is category. The two 50% venues are pass-through sites — a deli and a shop — and across all 81 placements that set a share, the pass-through venues all sit at 50%, and destination venues cluster at 40% or 30%. Traffic and share both track venue type; they do not track each other. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests that directly.

How does Florida’s busiest venue compare on captive time?

Worse than its traffic suggests, and this is where footfall and opportunity separate. The Miami deli’s 770 visitors a day is the highest count in Florida and joint fourth in the record. A deli visit is a few minutes.

Those last two columns turn a headcount into hours of exposure, which is the quantity that matters to a machine, and the basis of our ranking of vending locations. Neither a deli nor a rage room has a published visit length, so Florida’s two most distinctive venues cannot be placed on the scale at all.

What can be said is that Boca Raton, with a sixth of Miami’s footfall, almost certainly offers more captive time — and it agreed the smallest share in the state. A venue that trades hours for a worse percentage is making a bad bargain on this evidence.

What does the Cape Canaveral listing show?

The floor of this market. A rage room reporting 8,400 visitors a year — 23 a day — is the third-quietest venue in the 87 listings, behind a New Jersey gymnastics gym at 3 a day and a Kentucky indoor playground at 19, and it still signed a 16-month minimum term at 30% of net.

That is worth recording precisely because it is unflattering. A machine seeing 23 people a day will not turn a meaningful volume at any share, so the placement is close to the smallest viable one in the record. For an operator reading state tables as market signals, it is a reminder that a placement count says nothing about placement quality: Florida’s six listings include one that is barely a business.

What is missing from Florida’s record?

The categories that dominate nationally. Florida has no bowling alley and no trampoline park on the record, and those two account for 25 of the 87 placements between them — the largest and fourth-largest categories.

Florida has bowling alleys and trampoline parks in abundance, so their absence reflects where the sales effort went rather than what the state contains. It does make Florida’s record unusually weighted toward pass-through retail — two of its six — which is worth remembering before treating the state’s high shares as a Florida characteristic. They are a retail characteristic that Florida’s sample happens to over-represent, a caution vending machine locations by state applies across the table.