‘My suckers are here!' Boy orders almost 70,000 lollipops on Amazon

The Age

08-05-2025

On Sunday morning, as Holly LaFavers was preparing to go to church, a delivery worker dropped off a 25-pound box of lollipops in front of her apartment building in Lexington, Kentucky.
And another. And then another. Soon, 22 boxes of 50,600 lollipops were stacked five boxes high in two walls of Dum-Dums. That was when LaFavers heard what no parent wants to hear: Her child had unwittingly placed a massive online order.
'Mom, my suckers are here!' said her son, Liam, who had gone outside to ride his scooter.
'I panicked,' LaFavers, 46, said. 'I was hysterical.'
LaFavers said in an interview that Liam, 8, became familiar with Amazon and other shopping sites during the pandemic, when she regularly ordered supplies. Since then, she has occasionally let him browse the site if he keeps the items in the cart.
But over the weekend, Liam had a lollipop lapse. He told his mother he wanted to organise a carnival for his friends, and mistakenly, he said, he ordered the sweets instead of reserving them.
And so the double ramparts of suckers rose on their doorstep, where the excesses of e-commerce crossed paths with tight-knit community.
LaFavers said that she discovered something was amiss after a shopping trip early Sunday, when she checked her bank balance online. 'It was in the red,' she said.
The offending item was a $US4200 charge ($6565) from Amazon for 30 boxes of Dum-Dums. Frantic and upset, she called Amazon, which advised her to reject the shipments. LaFavers was able to turn away eight of the boxes, totalling 18,400 lollipops, but the 22 boxes containing 50,600 lollipops had already landed.