Vending machine locations in Wyoming, by the numbers

What surrounds Wyoming

Six states, and not a single signed venue in any of them.

Colorado is the striking row. It is among the twenty most populous states on Census Bureau estimates, inside the locator’s stated coverage of every state but Alaska and Hawaii, and holds nothing — so a Wyoming venue cannot even borrow a Denver comparison.

Five states have no placed neighbour, and Wyoming is one

Most empty states can point across a line at somebody. West Virginia has 17 placements next door, Indiana 16, Iowa and Vermont 10 each. Five states have none at all.

The five form one continuous blank area through the northern Rockies and the plains, and Wyoming sits in the middle of it. That is a routing pattern rather than a market verdict: the record’s 87 placements cluster in the Midwest, the South and the two coasts, and nothing in the file suggests a Wyoming venue was approached and declined.

The nearest placement cannot be ranked either

Converting footfall into captive time needs a reported visitor count and a published average visit length for the venue type. The nearest listing to Wyoming has the first and not the second.

Roller rinks appear exactly once in the record, which also means there is no category median to measure Great Bend against — eleven of the 26 venue types here are single listings, and for each of them a category average is just the listing again. The conversion method is set out in our ranking of vending locations, and only five of the 26 types carry a published visit length at all.

So the closest usable comparison to Wyoming is 550 miles away in Lawrence, and it comes with a complication: Lawrence agreed 50% of net, one of only twelve placements in the file at that level. A Wyoming reader taking the nearest rankable venue as a benchmark would be taking an unusually expensive one.

What the record offers a Wyoming reader instead

The national distribution, used honestly. With no state row and no regional row, the only defensible references are the file-wide figures.

Forty per cent is the number that travels. What does not travel is venue scale: traffic across the 69 placements that report a count runs from 3 visitors a day to 1,100, and no state average in this file is built from enough rows to be worth quoting at a Wyoming venue. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements is the fuller version.

What a first Wyoming placement would settle

Whether the blank area is a routing gap or a venue-supply one. Wyoming is the least populous state, so part of the answer is arithmetic — but Montana, Utah and the Dakotas are empty too, and together with Wyoming they cover a quarter of the land area of the lower 48 with no signed venue in it.

A single Cheyenne or Casper bowling alley would convert immediately, because bowling alleys carry a published visit length and are the deepest category in the file at 18 listings. One rankable row in this blank area would do more for a reader here than any national median does, and vending machine locations by state shows where every state currently stands.