Andrew Dickman

Andrew Dickman built a tabletop advertising screen for restaurants and put it on tables across Georgia.

SALTYmf had been advertising on the MacCaddy for two years by the time Dickman sat down on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast, and the story they opened with was the time it went wrong. Dickman was in a restaurant he knows well, watching the rotation with the owner, when a SALTYmf slide came up with an American flag and a middle finger on it. She told him she could not have her seven year olds looking at that. He called Brad, Brad pulled it, and nobody made a thing of it. It was the Independence tee, made for the Fourth of July.

The idea came out of COVID. Five to eight friends were coming to his house for dinner most nights of the week, with his youngest son and daughter there, and he cooked on the grill on the back deck while the conversation kept circling back to restaurants. Servers were short, owners could not get information in front of their own customers, and the room was expensive to reach. The device that came out of it rotates thirty slides every four minutes and charges up to four phones at once, so a table waiting on food has a reason to look at it. QR codes point at a website, a thirty second video, an event signup, and he can report how many times a code was hit in a month. Restaurants can take a free package, pay a small fee for more devices, or rent the whole setup and sell their own advertising. He keeps the number of advertisers per vertical low so no table is looking at fifteen lawyers.

The businesses he names are the ones close to home. North Georgia Reaper Graphics and Steve Slayton have been with him from the beginning. Slayton Heating and Air donated an HVAC system to a family heading into winter. He sets deals up between his own advertisers, an indoor driving range that teaches lessons and three restaurants who will give them weekends in the back. A server at McCray's Tavern in Lawrenceville calls him Mr. MacCaddy, and the last time he stopped in she told him about a woman who came in frantic with a dead phone, a broken down car and not much English, and that the first thing she did was grab a MacCaddy and plug the phone in, then talk to her in Spanish until her husband came. Three weeks before the episode the devices went into an ice rink complex in Jacksonville.