A 6-year-old in Michigan may not receive an allowance for a couple years after ordering over $1,000 worth of food from Grubhub.
Father-of-two Keith Stonehouse was watching his kids last month when his 6-year-old Mason asked to use his smartphone. And since they were just relaxing on the couch watching television, Keith decided to let Mason have the phone.
“You have 30 minutes,” he told him, and apparently Mason took that as a challenge. After the 30 minutes ended, Keith took back his phone and told Mason he needed to get ready for bed, which he did without a fuss.
There was no fight, no ‘I’m hungry’ or making up stuff to stay up. He just went to bed, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing. I wish Mom was here to witness this.’ And all of a sudden I hear the doorbell.
He saw a woman drop off a large package on the front porch. At first, he assumed it was items for a wedding cake because his wife runs a cake-baking business.
But then the doorbell rings again, and again, and again… AND AGAIN!
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?’ 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. 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.’
He then noticed a fraud alert from his bank, declining a $489 pizza order, but sadly a separate $183 order from the same pizza place managed to squeeze through.
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. There’s nothing you can do. So I just had to take it and that was that.
Mason charged over $1,000 to his father’s card, but there is some good news. After Keith’s story went viral, Grubhub reached out and gave him a $1,000 gift card.
We reached out to Keith Stonehouse once we heard about the unexpected spending spree his son went on. We wanted to make things better for him and his family, so have offered to send him $1,000 worth of Grubhub gift cards.
Parents… keep those spending apps on lock!
