Vending machine locations in Pennsylvania, by the numbers

What is on the record for Pennsylvania

Three venues inside one metropolitan area.

All three are within about thirty miles of each other, which makes Pennsylvania the tightest geographic cluster in the dataset — three placements that would share a single service route.

The biggest number in the dataset, and why it is unusable

Export’s 1,100 visitors a day leads the record. The next figures are a Cincinnati filling station at 990, a Houston filling station at 960, a Miami deli at 770 and a Virginia Beach amusement park at 770.

Converting any of them 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 — 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. The method is set out in our ranking of vending locations.

So three of the dataset’s five busiest venues cannot be placed on the captive-time table at all, and the two that can are filling stations whose three-to-four-minute visit length drops them near the bottom of it. The record’s traffic leaders and its exposure leaders are almost disjoint sets.

Where Pennsylvania’s measurable venues do land

Near the top. Converting the two bowling alleys at 2.7 hours each:

Pittsburgh is joint second of the 44 convertible listings, and it agreed 30% of net — the lowest share in the record, shared with ten other placements. So Pennsylvania contains both the second-highest exposure figure in the dataset and one of its lowest shares, in the same listing.

The two bowling alleys disagree with each other

Five days and thirty miles apart, same category, opposite ends of the share range available to bowling.

Across the record, seven of the eighteen bowling alleys agreed below 40% against six of the other 69 placements — so a bowling alley at 30% is following a category pattern rather than breaking one. What Pennsylvania adds is the control: the same operator, the same month, the same category, and the busier venue on worse terms. Beyond the Pennsylvania row, the full distribution sits in what the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements, well beyond Pennsylvania.

What is missing from Pennsylvania’s record?

The eastern half of the state, and three of the four categories that carry the dataset. All three Pennsylvania listings sit around Pittsburgh; Philadelphia, Allentown, Harrisburg, Scranton and Erie appear nowhere, and there is nothing from trampoline parks, indoor playgrounds or family entertainment centres.

For a state of Pennsylvania’s size that is a narrow sample — three venues in one metropolitan area, describing a sales route rather than a state. Vending machine locations by state shows where every state stands.