Vending machine locations in New Hampshire, by the numbers

What is on the record for New Hampshire

Two venues, six weeks apart, both standard tier.

The two ways a listing stops being measurable

Converting a placement into hours of exposure needs two inputs: a reported visitor count, and a published average visit length for the venue type. The method is set out in our ranking of vending locations, and it fails if either input is missing.

Only five of the 26 venue types in this record have a published visit length: indoor playgrounds and trampoline parks at 1.5 hours, family entertainment centres at 2.5, bowling alleys at 2.7, and filling stations at three to four minutes. Everything else — arcades, gymnastics gyms, malls, shops, ice rinks, water parks, escape rooms, indoor mini golf — can be counted but not converted.

New Hampshire’s two listings happen to fall one on each side of that line, which makes the state a clean illustration of a limit the dataset carries everywhere.

Why Claremont is the harder of the two gaps

Because its number looks usable and is not. Manchester reports nothing, so no reader is tempted; Claremont reports 77,000 visitors a year, which is a solid figure and reads like evidence.

It is evidence of something narrow. Seventy-seven thousand annual visitors at an indoor venue is real traffic — more than three of Mississippi’s four measured venues and more than any of Michigan’s. What cannot be said is how it ranks, because indoor mini golf appears exactly once in the entire record. There is no category median, no second listing of the type, and no published visit length to convert by.

Eleven of the 26 venue types here are represented by a single listing: indoor mini golf, mini golf, a deli, a rage room, a roller rink, a food service site, an indoor soccer centre, a kids centre, an ice rink, a haunted attraction and a campground. For each of them, a “category average” is just the listing again wearing a different label.

What the two shares do support

One claim, cleanly. Both New Hampshire venues agreed 40% of net, which is the median across the 81 placements that state a figure: 55 at 40%, twelve at 50%, eleven at 30%, two at 35% and one at 45%.

Two independent listings landing on the median is a stronger signal than one, and it is consistent with the pattern the whole record shows — that the share sorts by venue category rather than by venue size. New Hampshire’s two categories are both destination types, and destination venues in this dataset sit at 40% or below, with a single exception in Lawrence, Kansas. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements works through the split.

What is missing from New Hampshire’s record?

The two measurable categories, and the southern metro corridor. New Hampshire shows no bowling alley and no trampoline park — the two types that, with indoor playgrounds and family entertainment centres, supply 44 of the 87 national placements and all of the state records that can be ranked.

Manchester, Nashua, Concord, Salem and Portsmouth hold both. A single bowling alley placement would give New Hampshire its first convertible listing and its first comparable one, which is a larger improvement to the state’s row than a third unmeasurable venue would be. Vending machine locations by state shows where every state stands.