Vending machine locations in Maryland, by the numbers

What is on the record for Maryland?

One venue, on the barrier island at the state’s southeastern corner.

Premium tier requires a venue reporting 100,000 or more visitors a year. Ocean City reports half again that threshold, which is the most comfortable margin above it of any premium venue in a single-listing state.

How Ocean City compares with its own category

Ocean City is the outlier of its type by a wide margin. Fifteen indoor playgrounds appear in the record and eleven report a visitor count.

Ocean City reports nearly four times the category median and almost double the next busiest venue of its type. Within its own category nothing is close.

Why more visitors produced less captive time

Because the categories are weighted by how long a visit lasts. Converting footfall into hours of exposure — visitors a day times a published average visit length, the method behind our ranking of vending locations — uses 1.5 hours for an indoor playground and 2.5 to 2.7 for a family entertainment centre or bowling alley.

Pittsburgh, Slidell and Auburn each see about two-thirds of Ocean City’s visitors and each produce more exposure hours. Tyngsborough sees 66% more visitors and produces three times as many. On this measure the venue type does more work than the headline count does, which is the whole argument for converting at all.

A reasonable objection is that 1.5 hours may understate an indoor playground in a resort town, where a visit is an afternoon rather than an errand. The method applies one published figure per category precisely so that individual venues cannot be re-rated on assumption — but the sensitivity is real, and at 2.5 hours Ocean City would top everything except Tyngsborough.

What the 410 figure actually is

Arithmetic. The listing reports 150,000 visitors a year, and 410 is that divided by 365. Ocean City’s year is strongly seasonal, so the real distribution is nowhere near flat — most of the 150,000 arrive in a few months and very few arrive in the rest.

That cuts both ways for a reader. The peak-season figure is far above 410, which makes the venue stronger than it looks during the months that matter. The off-season figure is far below it, which makes a twelve-month cost structure look worse than the annual average implies.

Nothing in the record quantifies either end, because no listing anywhere in the dataset reports a monthly breakdown. Several other venues here are plainly seasonal too — Maine’s outdoor mini golf course most obviously — so the caution is not a Maryland problem so much as a limit of annual totals.

And the terms did not move

Ocean City agreed 40% of net: the median across the 81 placements that state a share, and the median for indoor playgrounds specifically.

The pattern holds in both directions across this dataset. Maryland’s venue is almost four times its category median and took 40%; Kentucky’s four venues all sit below their category medians and took 40%; Louisiana’s single premium venue sits half again above its median and took 40%. Shares sort by venue category rather than by venue size, as what the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests in full.

What is missing from Maryland’s record?

Every other venue type, and the whole of the state away from the coast. One indoor playground on a barrier island is the entire Maryland record; bowling alleys, trampoline parks, family entertainment centres and arcades — 44 of the 87 national placements between them — are absent.

Baltimore, Columbia, Frederick, Annapolis and the Washington suburbs hold all four categories and trade year-round, which would also settle the seasonality question the Ocean City listing raises and cannot answer. Vending machine locations by state shows where every state stands.