Vending machine locations in Massachusetts, by the numbers

What is on the record for Massachusetts?

Two venues, twenty-five miles apart, signed twelve days apart.

Premium tier requires a venue reporting 100,000 or more visitors a year. Tyngsborough reports two and a half times that threshold, the largest margin above it of any placement in the record.

How far ahead of the field Tyngsborough is

Far enough that it distorts any average it appears in. Converting Massachusetts footfall into hours of exposure — visitors a day times a published average visit length, the method behind our ranking of vending locations — produces this top of the table:

The gap between first and second is larger than the gap between second and twentieth. For a two-listing state that is an unusual position to hold, and it comes from one venue reporting a quarter of a million visitors in a category whose median is 140 a day.

The finding: exposure and share move in opposite directions here

Tyngsborough agreed 30% of net. Fifty-five of the 87 placements agreed 40%, twelve agreed 50%, eleven agreed 30% and two agreed 35%. The venue with the most captive time in the dataset took the least.

That is not a Massachusetts anomaly but the sharpest instance of a category effect running through the record.

Roughly two in five bowling alleys agreed less than the median, against roughly one in eleven of every other placement. Bowling has the longest published visit length of any category here and the weakest share outcomes, which is the clearest evidence in this dataset that shares are not priced on exposure at all.

A reasonable counter-argument is that a bowling alley has more competing revenue — lanes, shoes, food, bar — and so values a vending commission less in the negotiation. The record cannot test that, because no listing reports venue revenue. It can only establish that the correlation runs the wrong way, which what the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements examines in full.

What the Boston listing does not say

Its share. Boston is one of six placements in the record that state no revenue share, alongside venues in California, Florida, New York, Ohio and Texas.

That matters more in a two-listing state than a ten-listing one. Massachusetts has a median share of 30% because exactly one of its venues stated a figure, and a single-value median is not a median at all — it is a data point wearing a label. Any state summary showing Massachusetts at 30% is reporting Tyngsborough and rounding the sample to one.

Eighteen of the 87 listings also report no visitor count. Between the two gaps, 44 placements are convertible into visitor-hours and 43 are not.

What is missing from the Massachusetts record?

Three of the four categories that carry this dataset. Massachusetts shows a bowling alley and an indoor playground; trampoline parks, family entertainment centres and arcades are absent, and those three plus bowling supply 44 of the 87 national placements.

Worcester, Springfield, Lowell and the Boston suburbs hold all of them. Their absence describes where a sales route reached in one season rather than what Massachusetts contains. Vending machine locations by state shows where every state stands.