A young boy ordered $1,000 in food from GrubHub over the weekend after playing on his dad’s phone.
Mason Stonehouse is a six-year-old from Michigan and was using his father’s phone when he bought $1,000 in to-go food items, which involved $183 of jumbo shrimp and “endless” chili fries, as well as ice cream, according to the New York Post. The bank shut down the purchases when he tried to order “$439 worth of pizzas.”
“That would’ve been on top of the thousand dollars worth of food that was piling in my kitchen,” Keith Stonehouse, his father, said.
Stonehouse said he let his young son play a game on his phone for around thirty minutes before he went to bed. Delivery drivers from the GrubHub app started coming to the child’s home after he went to bed.
“I was putting Mason to bed and saw a car pull up and the doorbell rang with the driver dropping off a big bag of stuff,” he told MLive earlier this week. “My wife owns ‘A Slice of Heaven Cakes’ bakery and it was a big wedding weekend, so I thought it was just someone dropping off decorative stuff they used from her. But it was from Leo’s Coney Island. I said, ‘What the heck?’”
“The doorbell rang again and it kept happening. Car after car. Cars were pulling into the driveway while others were pulling out. I finally asked one of them what they were delivering. He said we ordered chicken shwarmas [sic]. I took the food and then it hit me. I looked at my phone with repeated messages that my food was getting ready, my food was being delivered. I looked at my bank account and it was getting drained,” he added
“I looked at my phone and all of a sudden I see ‘Grubhub, Grubhub, Grubhub’ and in that same second all these cars and all these lights and the doorbells going off,” Stonehouse told Good Morning America in an interview over Zoom. “They kept coming and they kept coming.”
“This was like something out of a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” Stonehouse said. “I was probably a 9.5 out of 10 anger while it was happening. The next day, I was at an eight and now I’m at about a three. I don’t really find it funny yet, but I can laugh with people a little bit. It’s a lot of money and it kind of came out of nowhere.”
“He’s 6, so it doesn’t kind of sink in. It’s not like if our 13-year-old did this, then it would sink in to him,” Stonehouse noted. “Trying to explain this to a 6-year-old, we told him we took money out of his piggy bank to pay for this bag of food and this one and so on. We could tell he was upset, but we don’t know if it has really sunk in. That’s the frustrating part.”
The fact that restaurants are charging such a hefty amount for to-go orders could come as a shock to many, and Americans are feeling the strain of inflation, especially when it comes to food items. Restaurant food went up 8.3% in December over the past year.
Stonehouse said the family stored most of the items in their refrigerators and they also had neighbors come to their house to eat some of it.
The company did offer to help out a little bit when they heard about the incident.
“We wanted to make things better for him and his family, so have offered to send him $1,000 worth of Grubhub gift cards,” a representative told Good Morning America.
Post a Comment