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, Ky.
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 Ms. 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,” Ms. LaFavers, 46, said. “I was hysterical.”
Ms. 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 organize a carnival for his friends, and mistakenly, he said, he ordered the candy instead of reserving it.
And so the double ramparts of suckers rose on their doorstep, where the excesses of e-commerce crossed paths with tight-knit community.