Vending machine locations in Kentucky, by the numbers

What is on the record for Kentucky?

Four venues of four different types, fully reported, signed inside a single month.

Complete reporting across all four is better than most states manage, and it is what makes the pattern below legible at all.

The share that never moved

Kentucky is the cleanest demonstration in this dataset that the share is not negotiated against traffic. Its four venues span a sixfold range — 19 visitors a day to 120 — and every one of them agreed 40% of net.

Only one other state with three or more listings is internally uniform: Tennessee, also at 40% across three. Everywhere else the number varies, usually by venue category rather than by size.

What Kentucky adds is the demonstration that it does not vary by size within a category either. A trampoline park at 88 visitors a day took the same share as a gymnastics gym at 120 and an indoor playground at 19. If a venue’s bargaining position were a function of its footfall, four placements in four weeks across a sixfold spread would show it. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests the same relationship across the full set.

How small are Kentucky’s venues?

Consistently below their categories, and in two cases dramatically so.

Bowling Green is the second-quietest venue anywhere in the record; only a gymnastics gym in Flanders, New Jersey, at 3 visitors a day, reports less. Georgetown is fourth-quietest.

That matters for anyone reading a state table as a measure of market quality. Kentucky’s four placements make it joint-seventh by count, ahead of twenty-one states with none and level with Georgia and Texas — and its venues are among the smallest in the dataset. Count and quality are different axes, and vending machine locations by state only reports the first.

What does captive time look like here?

Thin, where it can be computed at all. Converting Kentucky footfall into hours of exposure — visitors a day times a published visit length, the method behind our ranking of vending locations — gives figures far below the national type medians.

Gymnastics gyms have no published visit length in this dataset, so Lexington — Kentucky’s busiest venue — cannot be placed on the scale.

A venue offering 29 visitor-hours a day is offering very little machine time, and it agreed the same terms as venues offering ten times that elsewhere. Whatever determines the share in this market, the amount of captive time a venue provides is not it.

What is missing from Kentucky’s record?

Bowling, the largest category nationally with 18 placements and none here. Kentucky’s four span family entertainment, gymnastics, indoor play and trampolines — a wide spread of types, but not the one that dominates everywhere else.

Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green and Owensboro all have bowling alleys, so the gap describes a sales route rather than the state. It also means Kentucky offers no comparison for the single most common venue type an operator is likely to be offered.