Apex Entertainment in Marlborough shares its building with a few other businesses, and the third floor is its own little ecosystem — an escape room, Apex Kids, Altitude Trampoline Park, and Planet Fitness, all on the same level, with an elevator and stairwell running up to a fourth floor that includes axe throwing among other things. It's a different kind of building than anything else in our network, and it came about in a pretty simple way: George Aronstein, COO of Apex Entertainment, saw our machines at Altitude Marlborough — also on that third floor — and asked if we'd bring Freedom Vending into Apex Kids too.
We ended up placing two machines: one inside Apex Kids, and one in the third floor's main atrium.
Apex Kids
Apex Kids is a dedicated play area built for younger kids — a jungle gym, obstacle courses, giant inflatables, all inside a shoes-off, sock-required space. Parents post up nearby while their kids burn off energy, which makes it a completely different traffic pattern than the rest of the building. It's parents watching and waiting, not players moving between attractions. That's a machine that needs to serve a waiting-room crowd, not a walk-through crowd.
The Atrium
The atrium is the opposite. It's the shared common space that all four third-floor businesses open onto, so it sees a steady mix of escape room guests, Apex Kids parents, Altitude Marlborough families, and Planet Fitness members passing through — plus anyone heading to the elevator or stairs up to the fourth floor. Higher foot traffic, more impulse buys, less dwell time. Early numbers back that up: the atrium machine is carrying the bulk of the volume between the two.
There was already a machine in that spot — a cash-only setup with a handful of beverage options that had done its job for a long time. We were glad to bring in a cashless, fully stocked smart machine to build on that and give the third floor an upgraded amenity.
Splitting the install this way — one machine tuned for a captive, waiting crowd and one tuned for a high-traffic thoroughfare — is exactly the kind of placement thinking we try to bring to every location. It's not just "put a machine somewhere in the building." It's matching the machine to how people actually move through the space.
Ten Locations In
Apex Entertainment is our tenth active location and our fifteenth machine deployed. We're already in three Altitude Trampoline Parks, so entertainment venues aren't new territory for us — but Apex is the first time we've placed machines inside a shared, multi-tenant building like this, with several different businesses sharing the same floor and foot traffic. It's a good sign that the model holds up in a more complex setting, not just a single-purpose facility.
— Austin & Sam, Freedom Vending LLC · Merrimack, NH