Vending machine locations in New Mexico: the I-40 gap

What is on the record next door

Five placements sit across two bordering states, and two of them are at the top of the share range. Texas supplies four and Oklahoma one, which is more than most empty states can reach — Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas have nothing in any neighbouring state at all.

Two of Texas’s four agreed 50% of net and both are pass-through venues. The other two are a premium hotel at the 40% median and an indoor soccer centre that states no share at all. That is the national pattern in miniature, and it is the most useful thing a New Mexico reader can take from the neighbourhood.

Filling stations are the dataset’s strange category

Two appear in the record and both are extraordinary on traffic: Cincinnati at 990 visitors a day and Houston at 960. Those are the second and third highest figures among all 87 placements.

They are also the shortest-dwell category by a clear margin. The published average visit length used for a filling station is three to four minutes, against 2.7 hours for a bowling alley.

So on captive time the two filling stations rank near the bottom of the 44 convertible listings, and on share they sit at the top — both agreed 50% of net. The conversion method is set out in our ranking of vending locations, and this is the clearest case in the dataset of the two metrics disagreeing completely.

The honest conclusion is that a forecourt sells on footfall rather than on dwell, and that the record’s shares reflect venue kind rather than exposure. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests that in full.

What that implies for an empty New Mexico row

The New Mexico gap sits in the category the state is best supplied with. Interstates 40 and 25 cross at Albuquerque; I-40 runs the width of the state from Gallup to Tucumcari, and I-25 from Las Cruces to Raton. The forecourts along those routes are the nearest New Mexico equivalent to Houston and Cincinnati.

Nothing in the dataset tests them, because New Mexico is empty and so are Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Nevada. Only Texas and Oklahoma, on the eastern side, have anything at all.

New Mexico is therefore better placed than Montana or Wyoming, where no bordering state has a single listing, and worse placed than Indiana or West Virginia, whose neighbours hold sixteen and seventeen between them.

How much of the blank is population

Some of it. On Census Bureau estimates New Mexico is among the less populous states, so an empty row is closer to what population predicts than it is for Arizona, Minnesota, Indiana or Colorado — the four populous states that are inside the locator’s stated coverage and still absent.

What the zero cannot be read as is a judgement about New Mexico venues. The record captures one locator’s signatures in one 2026 season; an empty state shows where a sales route went, and nothing distinguishes a venue that declined from one never approached. Alaska and Hawaii are the only blanks with a published explanation, being outside the company’s stated coverage.

What a first New Mexico placement would settle

Whether the forecourt pattern holds away from a major metro. Both filling stations in the record sit in large metropolitan areas — Cincinnati and Houston — and nothing tests a high-traffic interstate site in a sparsely populated state, which is what most of New Mexico’s I-40 corridor is.

That is a genuinely open question rather than a gap in coverage, and it is the one a New Mexico listing would answer. Vending machine locations by state shows where every state stands.