Are vending machines really that analogous? Vending machines are all about placement & location, and the ability of a vendor to find high traffic locations to

Are vending machines really that analogous? Vending machines are all about placement & location, and the ability of a vendor to find high traffic locations to put machines. Machines get placed based on info about locations whether it's demographics, or a kind of business or whatever. Individual transactions may not have identity tied to them, but it's not like the business is devoid of information about users, or hypotheses about them. And on the internet... how do you get that info from your users aside from usage analytics (even if it's gross analytics)?