User chaiporneng shares their learning experience with some bad movers:
I recently had an extremely bad experience with a moving company and I want to write this post to warn people out there, especially those who are looking to move house soon. I want to focus this post on sharing what happened and my learning points.
I moved from a 2 bedroom apartment of 990 sqft. They started the move at 9.30am and concluded it at 5.30pm. Their initial quote was that it would take 2 trips at $320 per trip, but on the day of the move itself, they said – a lot of things, need to make more trips. So they ended up taking 4 trips.
There is another item in the quotation called ‘distance to push’, which starts from $50 and would be capped at $150. The condos I moved to and from are street-level condos with lift access. I haven’t exactly measured but the distance from truck to lift would have been no more than 30m. They did not clarify what I will be charged for this item until the invoice was presented to me at the end of the move. $150 max distance to push was added to each trip. That meant that each trip cost $470.
During the lunch hour, the truck took a long time to get back to my condo. Turns out they went for lunch without telling me. Along the way, we saw that the truck wasn’t actually completely empty and took a photo of it.
When I engaged their service, I asked for a packing service to be included ($15 per box), but I also packed 20 boxes myself before the move. On the day itself, they packed an additional 30 boxes. The kicker is, when I unpacked the boxes the day after, I found out that most of them were ⅓ full. Plants that were placed into boxes were also considered charged $15, apparently simply for the use of a box.
The bill came up to $2,380 (this is 3x what I previously paid). I wrote an email to them detailing all the issues I faced with the move. No reply from them.
I had some difficulty reaching the boss, and when I eventually did, this boss refused to give me his name or identify himself. He gave a bunch of excuses, ‘Eh, now that the move is completed, you want compensation?” He even said, why should I address the points you raised in your email? And even challenged me to take it to Small Claims Tribunal. I think he realised that I was fully ready to take the legal route and eventually agreed to compensate me, obviously reluctantly.
For comparison, I have a friend who moved his entire family of 3 out of a 3000 sqft apartment recently for $1,500.
My learning points
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It was a FB review that made me engage them. This was from someone I didn’t know well enough to know if the recommendation would be solid. My error in judgement here.
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I should have gotten a mover who would give me a fixed quote with as few variables as possible. The ‘distance to push’ was their trick to arbitrarily jack up the price onsite, not to mention other things like a truck that wasn’t empty and dishonest packing. They were obviously not mindful of time (start at 9.30am? Disappear at lunch hour?) and unprofessional.
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It’s hard to find a reliable packing service. My previous mover did an honest job with packing my things and they would have done better than this. They took half a day to move and it cost 3x less.
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if you are able to, check the truck before the move starts to make sure it is empty before they start loading your stuff in
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I want to support local businesses, but crooks like these leave me nothing but completely disgusted. I’d rather use foreign movers and leave them a mega tip than to put up with these uncouth cheats.
Consumers beware. Hopefully you won’t ever go through what I did.