Vending machine locations in Maine, by the numbers

What is on the record for Maine?

Two venues, forty miles apart, signed six weeks apart.

Premium tier requires a venue reporting 100,000 or more visitors a year, and Auburn reports exactly that figure — sitting on the threshold rather than clear of it. Portland at 49,000 is squarely standard tier.

How strong is Auburn, measured properly?

Strong enough to be joint top of its category. Converting Maine footfall into hours of exposure — visitors a day times a published visit length, the method behind our ranking of vending locations — puts Auburn well clear of the family entertainment centres around it.

Family entertainment centres rank highest of any venue type in this dataset on captive time, and 270 a day is the highest figure any of them reports — matched only by Slidell, Louisiana. Across every convertible listing in the record, only three bowling alleys offer more captive time than Auburn does.

Why Portland cannot be ranked at all

Because the conversion needs a published average visit length, and outdoor mini golf does not have one in the sources this record uses. Five venue types do: family entertainment centres at 2.5 hours, bowling alleys at 2.7, trampoline parks and indoor playgrounds at 1.5, and gas stations at three to four minutes. Those five cover 44 of the 87 placements. The other 43 can be counted but not converted.

Portland is an extreme case of that limit rather than an exception to it. Mini golf appears once in the entire record, and so do ten other venue types — eleven of the 26 types here are represented by a single listing. A median for a category of one is just the listing again.

So the honest treatment is to report Portland’s traffic and stop: 49,000 visitors a year, 130 a day, 40% of net, signed August 24, 2026. Anything further would be a number invented to fill a column, and what the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements is clear about which parts of this dataset support a ranking and which do not.

What the two Maine listings agree on

The share, and nothing else. Auburn is premium tier with 270 visitors a day; Portland is standard tier with 130, outdoors, and closed for a northern winter. Both agreed 40% of net, the median across the 81 placements that state a share.

Maine therefore repeats, inside one state, the pattern the whole record shows: the share sorts by venue category rather than by venue size, and a venue at the top of the strongest category gets the same percentage as a seasonal course at a fraction of the traffic.

There is a second reading in the dates. Auburn signed in mid-July and Portland in late August, which is the tail of a northern outdoor season. A course signing in late August is committing most of its sixteen-month term to months it will not be trading in, and the listing records none of that.

What is missing from Maine’s record?

Every indoor category except family entertainment. Maine shows nothing from bowling, indoor playgrounds, trampoline parks or arcades — 44 of the 87 national placements between them, and the four types that carry the measurable part of this dataset.

Bangor, Lewiston, South Portland and Augusta hold all four. Their absence describes where a sales route reached in one season rather than what Maine contains, which is the standard caution attached to every short state record here. Vending machine locations by state shows where each state stands.