Then I found myself in the same situation as you in an airport news stand. I think I spent a minute looking at the awful selection of headphones and earbuds before I decided to walk way out of my way to the Best Buy machine.
Surprisingly got a GREAT deal on a pair of mid-range Sony over-ear headphones for a bit cheaper than what I could see on London in-store prices or even on Amazon :-O I suspect because of some inventory clearance deal? Literally every other SKU in the vending machine was terribly overpriced though, so I was quite happy at this stroke of luck.
I'm still using the headphones to this day, so that was shockingly good value for airport vending machine clearance tat!
Edit: looked it up and I paid $50 for this, which is/was comparable to it's Amazon price at the time -- so not cheaper, but not ridiculously overpriced either.
A small company, running vending machines in airports, and maybe small towns.
Nope, rows of the mostly painful knockoffs of actual brands for $25-$50 dollars. The type of stuff you’d expect to see in r/crappyoffbrands. The only pairs they had that I’d consider paying for were ones which had the headphone jack, which ofc my phone doesn’t support and the adapter was being sold at something like 100%-200% more than somewhere like Target or BestBuy.