Vending machine locations in Virginia, by the numbers

What is on the record for Virginia

Two venues, four weeks apart, with almost nothing in common beyond the machine type.

Both Virginia rows are complete on the fields the listings carry, which is better than the national rate: 69 of 87 report a count and 81 state a share. What Virginia lacks is not reporting but a measurable category at the top of its own table.

Virginia’s biggest number has no scale attached

Converting footfall into captive time needs a published average visit length for the venue type, and amusement parks do not have one. Virginia Beach reports its traffic in full and still produces no position on any table.

Amusement parks appear twice in the whole record — Virginia Beach at 770 a day and Atoka, Tennessee at 140 — and both agreed 40% of net. A fivefold traffic difference inside a two-listing category produced no difference in price, and neither listing can be ranked. The conversion method is set out in our ranking of vending locations.

Eleven of the 29 states with placements have an unconvertible venue at the top of their own list. Virginia’s 770 is the largest of those after Pennsylvania’s ice rink at 1,100 a day, which makes it the biggest measurable-looking number in the file that measures nothing.

What Shenandoah actually converts to

About 221 visitor-hours a day: 82 visitors at the bowling-alley figure of 2.7 hours. Shenandoah is the fifth-lowest of the 16 bowling alleys that report a count, and the category median is 370.

The useful thing about the comparison is the sample behind it. Bowling alleys are the deepest category in the record at 18 listings, 16 of them counted, and their visit length comes from a federal time-use survey rather than an industry planning rule — so a Virginia bowling alley is one of the few venues in this dataset that can be placed against real peers.

What that produces for Virginia is an awkward pairing: the state’s rankable listing is one of the quieter rooms in its own category, and its impressive listing is unrankable.

Virginia’s internal spread is among the widest in the record

The two Virginia venues are 9.4 times apart on reported traffic, which is the fifth-widest gap among the states holding two or more counted listings.

A spread that wide inside two listings means a Virginia state average would be a number describing neither venue. For a reader weighing a Virginia building, the two rows are two separate benchmarks rather than a range with a middle, and vending machine locations by state shows how unusual that is at this listing count.

What the two Virginia shares show

Forty per cent at the busier venue and 30% at the quieter one — the reverse of what a volume argument predicts, since the bigger room also took the better price.

Category is the better explanation. Bowling alleys price lowest of any type in the record, with seven of eighteen below 40%, so Shenandoah’s 30% looks less like a penalty for being small and more like what its category does. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements runs the full comparison.

What is missing from Virginia’s record?

The three categories that carry both depth and a published visit length. Virginia has no family entertainment centre, no trampoline park and no indoor playground, and those three hold 33 of the 87 placements between them.

Northern Virginia, Richmond, Norfolk and Chesapeake are where such venues sit, and on Census Bureau estimates Virginia is among the dozen most populous states — so a two-listing record is thin for its size rather than explained by it. A single Richmond trampoline park or Fairfax playground would give the state a second rankable row and a real in-state range.