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Oregon returns nothing while its neighbours hold eight placements — seven in California, one in Washington — which is more than any other empty western state can reach. The catch is where those eight are: the nearest to Portland is roughly 600 miles away.
Figures below come from the 87 signed listings open on PinPoint Vending’s marketplace on October 5, 2026, covering 29 states. Traffic is venue-reported and unaudited; no listing reports sales.
By the numbers
| Measure | Oregon |
|---|---|
| Signed placements | 0 |
| States with none | 21 of 50 |
| Placements in bordering states | 8 |
| Rank among empty western states on that measure | 1st |
| Distance from Portland to the nearest listing | about 600 miles |
| National median share | 40% of net |
The Pacific coast has a thousand-mile hole in it
Three coastal states, eight placements, and the middle one empty — but the gap is larger than the state, because every California listing is from the Bay Area southwards and Washington’s one listing is nowhere near the coast.
| Coastal placement | Where |
|---|---|
| Kennewick, Washington | The state’s dry southeast, far inland |
| San Jose and Livermore, California | Bay Area |
| Ceres, California | Central Valley |
| Palmdale and Valencia, California | Los Angeles area |
| Yucca Valley, California | High desert |
| Oceanside, California | San Diego |
So the northernmost coastal-metro listing in the dataset is in the Bay Area, and the nearest listing of any kind to Portland or Seattle is Kennewick — several hundred miles east of both. Between the Bay Area and the Canadian border, a stretch containing Portland, Salem, Eugene, Tacoma and Seattle, the record holds one venue in a desert town.
Oregon is second only to Iowa on neighbouring placements
Among the fourteen contiguous empty states running from Oregon to Minnesota and down to New Mexico, only Iowa has a more active neighbourhood than Oregon does.
| Empty western or plains state | Placements in bordering states |
|---|---|
| Iowa | 10 |
| Oregon | 8 |
| Nevada | 7 |
| Arizona | 7 |
| Minnesota | 7 |
| New Mexico | 5 |
| Nebraska | 3 |
| Colorado | 3 |
| Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Utah | 0 |
Nationally Oregon is fifth on that measure, behind West Virginia with seventeen, Indiana with sixteen, and Iowa and Vermont with ten each. That is a better position than most of the western block — and it is almost useless in practice, because adjacency on a map is not adjacency on a service route.
What California’s seven can and cannot tell an Oregon reader
Five of the seven agreed 40% of net, which matches the national median exactly. One, a Ceres mall, agreed 50%, consistent with the pass-through pattern that holds across the record. One states no share.
The limits are sharper than the state count suggests. Three of California’s seven report no visitor count, and two more sit in a category with no published average visit length — so only two of the seven can be converted into hours of exposure at all, at roughly 450 and 259 visitor-hours a day. The conversion method is set out in our ranking of vending locations.
So the nearest evidence to Oregon is eight listings, two of which are measurable, none within 600 miles of the state’s population centre.
How much of the blank is population
Less than for most of the empty block. On Census Bureau estimates Oregon is a mid-sized state — more populous than Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Vermont or Rhode Island, and less so than 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 familiar: the record captures one locator’s signatures in one 2026 season. Only Alaska and Hawaii carry a stated reason for being blank, being outside the company’s declared coverage. Portland, Salem, Eugene, Beaverton and Hillsboro hold bowling alleys, trampoline parks, indoor playgrounds and family entertainment centres — the four categories supplying 44 of the 87 national placements.
What a first Oregon placement would settle
Whether a cool, damp climate behaves like a hot, humid one. Every wet region in this dataset is also warm: the Gulf coast, the Carolina coast, the Maryland shore. Nothing tests a place like the Willamette Valley, where relative humidity is high for much of the year and the temperature is not.
That matters because product loss on a vending route is driven by relative humidity rather than heat, and no listing in the record sits in a cool-wet region. An Oregon placement west of the Cascades would be the first; one in Bend, east of them, would test the opposite extreme in the same state. What the record settles beyond Oregon is in what the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements, and vending machine locations by state shows where each state stands.
Frequently asked questions
How many vending machine placements does Oregon have?
None. Oregon is one of 21 states with no signed venue in the record collected on October 5, 2026, which covers 87 placements across 29 states.
How many do its neighbours hold?
Eight — seven in California and one in Washington. That is more than any other empty western state can reach, and more than Nevada’s seven or Arizona’s seven.
So why is Oregon poorly served by that?
Distance. Washington’s single listing is in Kennewick in the dry southeast, and California’s northernmost are in the Bay Area — roughly 600 miles from Portland.
What does the Pacific coast look like in this dataset?
Eight placements across three states, with the middle one empty. Every California listing is from the Bay Area southwards, so the coastal chain has a gap of about a thousand miles in it.
What would a first Oregon placement establish?
Whether a damp temperate climate behaves like a humid one. Nothing in the record tests a cool, wet region, because the dataset’s wet states are all warm ones.
