Vending machine locations in New Jersey, by the numbers

What is on the record for New Jersey

Three venues, three counties, three weeks.

All three report a visitor count, which is better than the national rate — eighteen of 87 placements do not. All three are nonetheless unrankable, because the conversion needs a published average visit length as well.

The widest spread in the dataset, by a long way

Flanders to Elizabeth is 233 to 1. No other state comes close.

Flanders is the quietest placement in the entire record. The second quietest, an indoor playground in Bowling Green, Kentucky, reports nineteen visitors a day — more than six times as many. The third, a rage room in Cape Canaveral, Florida, reports twenty-three.

So New Jersey holds one end of the dataset’s traffic distribution and very nearly the other, which makes any New Jersey average meaningless: the mean of three, 700 and 330 is 344, a figure no New Jersey venue resembles.

Why none of the three can be ranked

Because converting footfall into hours of exposure needs a published average visit length for the venue type, and only five of the 26 types in this record have one: filling stations at three to four minutes, indoor playgrounds and trampoline parks at 1.5 hours, family entertainment centres at 2.5 and bowling alleys at 2.7. The method is set out in our ranking of vending locations.

New Jersey is therefore the largest state record in the dataset with zero convertible listings. Three counted venues, nothing rankable — which is a different and more frustrating gap than an empty state, because the numbers are there and cannot be used.

What the shares do show

The venue-kind split, cleanly, in one state. Elizabeth is a retail site, which is a pass-through venue: somewhere people walk through rather than stay. Eleven of the twelve placements at 50% of net in this record are pass-through venues, and Elizabeth is one of them.

So New Jersey’s apparently chaotic ordering is actually two rules operating at once: pass-through venues reach 50%, destination venues top out at 40%, and within the destination group traffic does nothing at all. Burlington’s 35% is one of only two instances of that figure in the record — the other is a bowling alley in Ithaca, Michigan. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests the split in full.

What is missing from New Jersey’s record?

Every measurable category. New Jersey shows an arcade, a gymnastics gym and a retail site, and nothing from bowling alleys, trampoline parks, indoor playgrounds or family entertainment centres — the four types supplying 44 of the 87 national placements and all of the state records that can be ranked.

Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Cherry Hill and the shore towns hold all four. A single bowling alley placement would give New Jersey its first rankable venue, which would improve the state’s row more than a fourth unmeasurable listing could. Vending machine locations by state shows where every state stands.