Vending machine locations in Wisconsin, by the numbers

What is on the record for Wisconsin

Seven venues, six categories, and a state that went from empty to full in under six weeks.

Six categories across seven listings is the widest spread in the record alongside California’s and Florida’s, and the traffic range inside it runs from 55 visitors a day to 480.

Wisconsin filled faster than any other deep state

The whole record spans 97 days, from May 29 to September 3, 2026. Wisconsin’s seven placements occupy 39 of them.

No other state with more than four placements filled in under forty days. That pace says nothing about venue quality, but it is the clearest signal in the file of concentrated route-building: a cluster signed in one push rather than accumulated across a season.

The most complete record is not the most rankable one

Converting footfall into captive time needs both a reported count and a published average visit length for the venue type, and only five of the 26 types in this record have the second. Wisconsin reports better than its peers and converts worse than one of them.

Ohio converts five of seven on four categories, four of them bowling alleys. Wisconsin converts four of seven on six categories. California, also on six categories, converts two. So breadth of venue type, not reporting discipline, is what decides how much of a state’s record can be ranked — and the method behind the conversion is set out in our ranking of vending locations.

The three Wisconsin rows that drop out fail for two different reasons: the Dells water park and the Rice Lake escape room report traffic in categories with no published visit length, and the Marion campground reports no count at all. The water park is the painful one, because at 480 visitors a day it is the state’s busiest venue by a wide margin.

What the four convertible Wisconsin venues come to

About 1,283 visitor-hours a day between them, and two of the four sit above their category medians.

New Berlin is the state’s best rankable venue, 18% above the family entertainment centre median. Appleton is the outlier in the other direction: the quietest trampoline park of the six that report a count, at a fifth of its category median, and it still agreed the same 40% as the Dells.

The share distribution has no top end

Wisconsin’s seven shares run 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40 and 30 — nothing at 50%, and nothing in between.

Twelve placements nationally hold 50%, and nearly all are pass-through venues — filling stations, malls, shops, a deli — a category Wisconsin’s record does not contain at all. So the missing top end is a composition effect rather than a state-level pricing pattern, which is also why the two Wisconsin bowling alleys are the more interesting comparison: 140 visitors a day at 40% against 110 at 30%. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements runs the full test.

What is missing from Wisconsin’s record

One big category and two big cities. Wisconsin has no indoor playground, the second most common category nationally at fifteen listings, and nothing in Milwaukee or Madison — the record runs through Green Bay, Appleton, the Dells, Platteville, Rice Lake, Marion and New Berlin.

On Census Bureau estimates Wisconsin is a mid-sized state that has placed as many machines as California, so its gap is not scale but geography: the depth sits outside the two metros. A Milwaukee indoor playground would add a category, a market and a fifth convertible row at once, and vending machine locations by state shows where each state stands.