6-year-old boy summons $1,000 in food deliveries off Grubhub
Imagine: Delivery car after delivery car pulls up to your house, bags of takeout dinners pile up on your porch, and they just keep coming. That’s what happened to a Michigan man who says his 6-year-old son ordered more than $1,000 worth of Grubhub grub on the dad’s phone.
Keith Stonehouse said he let his son Mason play with his phone for a half-hour last weekend at their house in Chesterfield Township, in the Detroit area. But this was no game: Mason ordered a feast using Stonehouse’s Grubhub account — jumbo shrimp, salads, shawarma and chicken pita sandwiches, chili cheese fries and more. The food came from several restaurants, so a string of cars descended on their house in rapid succession, the doorbell rang and rang, and the food piled up outside the front door.
Stonehouse said several orders had arrived before it started to dawn on him what was going on. By that time, there was nothing he could do to stop the delivery cars from coming.
“This was like something out of a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” Keith Stonehouse told MLive.com.
He added: “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.”
“It’s five orders of 20-piece jumbo shrimp, a bunch of chicken sandwiches, chili cheese fries and ice cream and grape leaves and rice and more sandwiches, and I’m like, ‘What is going on?’” Stonehouse told NBC’s “Today” show. “I’m piling it all up and I couldn’t figure it out.”
“I hadn’t looked at my phone in a long time after I grabbed it from him before bed,” Stonehouse says. “I look and it’s a continuous scroll of GrubHub reminders and alerts. ‘Your food has been ordered,’ ‘Your food’s being made,’ ‘Your food is coming,’ ‘Your food is delivered.’”
Stonehouse said Mason ordered from so many places that Chase Bank sent him a fraud alert and declined a $439 order pizza order. But not before Mason scored a $183 order of jumbo shrimp from the same restaurant.
And all these dinners were on top of the dinner that Stonehouse had ordered earlier from Grubhub. The family theorizes that the app was still open on his phone when he let Mason play with it.
As any mother will tell you, things fall apart when they’re not around. Mason’s mom, Kristin Stonehouse, was at the movies at the time. She told The Associated Press that Grubhub has offered them a $1,000 gift card and wants to use the family in an ad campaign.
Keith Stonehouse said most of the food went into the family’s refrigerators. He said he also invited some neighbors over to eat some of it.
The parents tried to explain the problem, but it sounds like it didn’t sink in. “I go up and I’m yelling at him, asking, ‘Why did you do this?’ and he’s looking at me with just his eyes above his blanket,” Stonehouse told “Today.” “Mason stops me mid-sentence and puts his hand out and says, ‘Dad, stop. When are the pepperoni pizzas coming?’”
