I hired First Class Moving to move my small amount of belongings (I live in a studio apartment) from Philadelphia to Minneapolis. The initial price estimate I received in my contract was $1,500. THE FINAL PRICE TO ME WAS $4,000!!! This difference is due to hidden fees. There was a fee because I lived in a large city, a fee for having an apartment that was over 50 feet from the moving truck (like most apartments), a fee for each stair the movers had to climb (in this case the 3 steps leading up to my front door), a fee because the movers “had difficulty parking”, a fee for the materials they used (a few rolls of tape that they used to secure the moving blankets), a fee for having more belongings than I listed in my inventory (even though I didn’t), and a fee for using more gas than they expected (again, because they claimed that I had too many belongings).
In my contract, it said that my belongings would be delivered in 4-5 days. However, after the movers picked up my belongings from my apartment in Philadelphia, they dropped them off at a warehouse just outside the city. My belongings sat in their warehouse for 10 days before even being loaded onto the truck to Minneapolis, because there “were not enough customers going in the same direction to fill a moving truck”. This was never mentioned until after they had already picked up my belongings. The delivery TOOK 15 FULL DAYS for a drive that should have taken less than 3 days.
And finally, when my belongings were finally delivered, I was shocked by the condition everything was in. The movers had broken legs off of two different tables, shattered my wooden bedframe, punched two holes in my bookshelf, snapped a leg off of one of my dining room chairs, and crushed a lamp. The company has told me that there is no way to be reimbursed for this ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF DAMAGE unless the movers saw the damage when they made the delivery. But of course the movers are in on the scam too; they did their best to hide the broken furniture from me!
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