Vending machine locations in Kansas, by the numbers

What is on the record for Kansas?

Two venues, eight days apart, both running cotton candy machines and both fully reported.

Roller rinks have no published visit length, so Great Bend cannot be placed on the captive-time scale. Lawrence can: 160 visitors at the 2.5-hour family entertainment centre figure works out to about 400 visitor-hours a day, derived the way our ranking of vending locations sets out.

Why does Lawrence matter to the whole dataset?

Because it is the exception that fixes the rule. Sorting all 81 placements that state a share by venue category produces a very clean result on one side and a nearly clean one on the other.

The pass-through half admits no exceptions: eleven venues, eleven at 50%. The destination half has exactly one, and it is this Kansas family entertainment centre.

That distinction is worth stating precisely, because the sloppy version — “destination venues are never paid 50%” — is false, and this single listing is the whole of why. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests the relationship across the full set.

Is Lawrence an unusually strong venue?

No, which makes it stranger. If a destination venue were going to command a pass-through rate, the obvious candidate would be an exceptional one. Lawrence is slightly below its type’s median.

So the venue that broke the pattern did so without the traffic to justify it on any measure in this record. Three explanations fit and the data separates none: the venue negotiated harder than its peers, something about the agreement differs in a way the listing does not show, or the share was set for reasons unconnected to the venue’s size.

What can be said is that it happened once in 81 placements, and that it happened to an ordinary venue rather than an exceptional one.

What else does Kansas show?

Beyond Lawrence, little. The state’s two venues sit either side of its median and neither is remarkable on traffic. Great Bend’s roller rink reports 96 visitors a day — a small-town venue in central Kansas — and took the standard 40%.

The pair also fills a category gap: roller rinks appear only once elsewhere in the entire record, so Kansas holds one of only two in the dataset. That makes the category impossible to generalise from and worth noting as a limitation rather than a finding.

Neither venue reports a premium tier, which is consistent with their traffic. Kansas is, apart from Lawrence’s share, an unremarkable two-listing state — and vending machine locations by state shows where that places it among the 29 states with a record.

What should an operator take from this?

Chiefly that a category median is a tendency, not a rule, and that the exceptions are findable. Before accepting that a destination venue “cannot” get 50%, it is worth knowing that one did, in Kansas, in August 2026, at below-median traffic.

The reverse is firmer. No pass-through venue in this record took less than 50%, so an operator offered a shop, forecourt or mall unit at 40% is being offered less than every comparable placement on the public record, and that is a straightforward thing to raise.