Vending machine locations in Illinois, by the numbers

What is on the record for Illinois?

Two venues, fully reported, signed in the same month.

Complete reporting on both is better than most states manage. What it buys here is the clearest demonstration in the dataset that a state is not a unit of analysis.

How far apart are they, really?

Further than any same-type pair in the record. Converting each venue’s footfall into hours of exposure — visitors a day times the 2.7-hour bowling visit length, the method behind our ranking of vending locations — puts Peru at roughly 729 and Hillsboro at about 76.

Peru exceeds every venue-type median in the dataset, family entertainment centres included, which top the ranking at 445. Hillsboro sits near the floor of everything measured.

The useful consequence is a warning about averages. An Illinois mean of 149 visitors a day describes neither venue and would badly mislead anyone using it to judge a third. Two listings is not a sample; it is two readings.

Does the share follow traffic here?

In Illinois it appears to, which is unusual and worth flagging rather than generalising. Peru took 40% and Hillsboro 30% — the busier venue getting the larger share.

Across the full record, traffic does not move the share. What sorts it is venue category: the pass-through venues all sit at 50% while destination venues cluster at 40% or 30%, largely regardless of footfall, which what the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests directly.

So the Illinois pair is either an exception or an artefact of tier. Peru is premium tier, which requires a venue reporting six figures of annual traffic, and if premium placements systematically carry different terms then the state’s apparent traffic effect is really a tier effect. With two listings there is no way to distinguish those, and claiming otherwise would be reading more than the data holds.

What is missing from Illinois’s record?

Everything except bowling. Illinois has two placements and both are the same category, which leaves the state’s record silent on the four other types that carry the dataset.

Chicago and its collar counties hold large numbers of all four absent categories, so the gap describes where a sales effort went rather than what Illinois contains — the same caution vending machine locations by state applies across the table.

It also means Illinois’s two data points cannot be used to say anything about the state beyond bowling. A Chicago-area trampoline park has no Illinois comparison at all.

What should an operator take from two listings?

Chiefly that the venue, not the state, is the unit worth assessing. Illinois demonstrates it more cleanly than any other state here: two bowling alleys, one state, one fortnight, and a tenfold difference in the thing that actually determines whether a machine sells anything.

Any state table — including ours — compresses that variation into a count and a median. Illinois’s count is 2 and its median share is 35%, and neither figure tells you whether the venue in front of you looks like Peru or like Hillsboro.