A boy with a hankering for chili cheese fries and pepperoni pizza is in big trouble after he used his dad’s phone to order $1,500 of his favorite foods.
Six-year-old Mason Stonehouse, of Chesterfield, Michigan, ordered enough food to feed a Super Bowl party while he was supposed to be using an educational app on his father’s phone just before bedtime Saturday.
Mason picked his favorite foods from his family’s favorite restaurants, putting in five orders of jumbo shrimp, 12 orders of chili cheese fries, $400 worth of pepperoni pizza and 16 scoops of ice cream, his father, Keith Stonehouse, told USA TODAY.
Stonehouse said Mason’s mischief happened on the one night a month his mother, Kristin, goes out with the girls. Stonehouse was putting Mason to bed when headlights flooded his boy’s bedroom and the doorbell rang.
Stonehouse opened the front door to find a giant bag of takeout. Thinking Kristin ordered the goodies for her and her friends to eat when they got home, Stonehouse didn’t think much of it.
“All of a sudden, ding dong,” Stonehouse said. “And I see more lights coming into the house and it’s another giant bag of food. I take it into the kitchen, then ding dong. … And it just keeps happening, and cars are pulling in while others are pulling out.”
That’s when it hit Stonehouse. Mason had been using his phone just before bed. He tracked down the device and saw a flood of notifications telling him his food was being prepared, on its way or had been delivered. There was one fraud notification on the $400 pizza order.
‘Are the pepperoni pizzas here yet?’
Stonehouse said he began yelling at his son when Mason stopped him.
“He puts his hands up and very matter-of-fact says: ‘Dad, Dad, Dad. One question,'” Stonehouse said. “I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Are the pepperoni pizzas here yet?'”
In all, Mason had ordered $1,500 worth of food, about $1,000 of which arrived because of fraudulent holds on Stonehouse’s card. Because Kristin Stonehouse runs a bakery out of the house, the family has four refrigerators that were able to hold the feast.
Mason also tipped the drivers 25%, on a night when the temperatures fell to 6 degrees, Stonehouse said.
As punishment, Mason hasn’t been allowed to eat any of the food and doesn’t get phone privileges. His parents also taught him a lesson by making him pay for a fraction of the damage with his piggy bank money.
‘Grubhub Boy’
It’s not all bad news for Mason, though. Grubhub’s chief operating officer and the head of marketing reached out to the family and gave them a $1,000 gift card.
The family also has done dozens of interviews, including with “Good Morning America” and “Today.”
Stonehouse said they’re trying to keep Mason away from some of the hoopla, but he already has become a celebrity at school.
“Everyone at school is calling him Grubhub Boy,” he said. “And so now he’s looking on our TV – he can use voice on the remote – ‘Grubhub Boy’ and it’s coming up on every YouTube thing and I’m like, ‘Oh, God, here we go.’
“It’s the twilight zone.”
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