One young boy managed to rack up a bill of close to $1,000 on GrubHub this past weekend after playing around on his father’s phone.
A six-year-old from Michigan, Mason Stonehouse ended up using his father’s phone when he purchased well over $1,000 in to-go food items, which included $183 of jumbo shrimp and “endless” chili fries, as well as a large amount of ice cream, as reported by the New York Post. The Father’s bank managed to shut down the card being used when the child attempted to place an order for a staggering “$439 worth of pizzas.”
“That would’ve been on top of the thousand dollars worth of food that was piling in my kitchen,” explained the boy’s father, Keith Stonehouse.
Stonehouse explained that he normally allowed his young sound to play games on his phone for about thirty minutes prior to going to bed. Delivery drivers assigned to the GrubHub App quickly began going to the child’s house 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 stated to MLive this past 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 went on.
“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,” explained Stonehouse to the hosts of Good Morning America as part of an interview via Zoom. “They kept coming and they kept coming.”
“This was like something out of a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” expressed Stonehouse. “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,” continued the dad. “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 idea that the restaurants taking part in the GrubHub app charge such a massive sum for to-go orders could come as a splash of cold water to most.
Stonehouse explained that the family has attempted to store the majority of the item in their refrigerators and they also tried to pull in their neighbors to disperse some of the foor.
The company spoke up in response with wishes to help out a bit when they discovered 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,” one GrubHub representative explained to Good Morning America.
