The Woman Behind Two Men and a Truck | Hacker News Reader

The Woman Behind Two Men and a Truck

fortune.com

158 pointsprostoalex72 comments

> I didn’t know anything about moving laws, and one day the state police came and looked at our paperwork. They found seven moves done without moving licenses, so I had to go to court, and I paid a fine of $100 for seven misdemeanors.

Well I can understand the licensing requirements to drive a truck, a taxi, or to work as electricians or plumbers, no one wants untrained drivers or tradesmen on the road due to safety - but why is a license required for moving?!

I think because shady movers can hold your stuff for ransom once they have it on their truck and out of your sight.

Well if a moving company would do this to me I'd simply call the cops for theft/extortion.

And if they don't have to be licensed, they're likely not going to be easy to find.

Even if they were licensed, they could literally drive anywhere to hide.

Once.

And the state wants to do that as little as possible for two reasons: first, a crime prevented is better than a crime punished, and second, the cops going after these shady movers, plus the prosecution and court case, the jails, etc. are all limited resources. Given that this is an avoidable problem by having licensing for movers, it's in the state's interest to save their resources for non-avoidable problems.

Licensing isn't unusual - for instance, the person who cuts your hair (assuming you're in the US) is almost certainly licensed by the state. If anything, it's a little unusual that the practice of software engineering has no licensing.

(The question of whether there's a fundamental human right to run a moving or haircutting or software-writing business is pretty separate; I'm just answering why it's rational for a society to ask its government to have licensing. If you believe there is such a right, then that overrules this analysis, sure.)

for instance, the person who cuts your hair (assuming you're in the US) is almost certainly licensed by the state

From what I understand there's been a fair bit of pushback on this one. Mostly related to it being a ridiculous and supposedly racist imposition.

How does licensing actually help prevent crime? It seems people will ill intent would just ignore the licensing requirement and people with good intent could be made criminals (as per this story).

Locks keep honest people honest, and the threat of losing your license prevents holders of licenses will discourage some shady behaviour.

It's certainly possible to run an illegal, unlicensed moving business, just like it's possible to run an illegal, unlicensed medical practice... But most customers will opt not to do business with one.

> Locks keep honest people honest, and the threat of losing your license prevents holders of licenses will discourage some shady behaviour.

But requiring a license to work in moving is a US oddity. Germany, for example, seems to work pretty well without (and we Germans have a reputation for licensing everything to death).

In Germany (and in the EU on general, after TIR was abolished and national laws harmonized), companies that provide transportation services (not specifically moving) do need special licensing, the drivers are licensed not only for operating a truck but also for transporting goods, and there's documentation detailing everything. It's not a free-for-all.

In theory, customers will check to see if a service provider is licensed before purchasing services. (In practice, as this article demonstrates, maybe they don't.)

Also, if a field is licensed, merely advertising / setting up shop in that field without a license is something the government can go after you for, even if you don't have any customers yet. So if I start putting up flyers for my shady "moving" company with the intent of stealing everything and never being heard from again, the police can find my place of business and hassle me, or set up a sting move, or something. (Again, in theory - if all you get is a $100 fine, maybe this isn't an effective deterrent.)

The cops would likely decline getting involved in a civil dispute. Movers claim you owe them extra charges, you claim they are scamming you, cop throws his hands up and tells you he can't force them to work; advises you to take the matter to court.

The shady movers have leverage, because you really need your stuff.

For intrastate moves only about half of US states require a license.

For long distance, interstate moves it's federally regulated and requires a license.

Do a quick google search on 'moving scams' and this should give you a good idea why licenses and regulations are a good idea in this industry. It's ripe for scams and shady characters.

Unbelievable, some of the stories I could tell...

> Unbelievable, some of the stories I could tell...

.... go on...

Probably not hard to fill in the gaps.

Step 1: encourage people to put the vast majority of their material possessions in someone else's vehicle, and pay for the privilege to do so.

Step 2: drive away.

Much more commonly, bait and switch on rates, holding possessions hostage until the new rate is paid, etc.

I had a locksmith pull that on me once. They gave me one quote over the phone, unlocked my car, then invoiced me for double.

Car movers are also notorious for this. The fun part there is that if you don't pay the new rate, they hit the road again and it can be another week before you get your car back-- assuming it hasn't been impounded.

What's a 'car mover'? Do people pay others to move their car for them? I can understand if the 'move' requires transit over water, but is there another reason for this?

I think it's fairly common with corporate relocations for the package to offer to put your cars on a car carrier and send you and the family via plane. I've had this opportunity a couple times and took advantage of it once.

If you see a car carrier unloading a car or two in or near a residential area or in a corporate parking lot, it's quite likely this is part of a relocation package.

Been a while since I used one... But $500 for cross-country car move as part of relocation. Beats the cost of flying back to home city, 48 hours of driving and multiple hotel nights.

Time.

My son, then living in Washington, DC, got a job offer in California. He had little time to find an apartment, etc., and it did not seem practical to spend what time he had driving across the country. We stuffed the trunk with what it would take, drove out to Montgomery County, and handed off the car to the mover.

Relocations mainly. If you have two cars with any value left in them and are moving cross-country, there are better uses of time and money than selling/rebuying or flying back and forth and driving the same distance twice just to move your cars.

In addition to the other threads here:

Buying specific cars tends to mean they're all over the country. Easier to fly there, check it out, and have it moved for you. Car collectors, for instance, though I assume the rich ones don't have these problems.

Sometimes it's cheaper to buy a car in state X and move it to you rather than buying it where you live. Also other countries, etc, though I assume you put that in the same mental-category as "over water" :)

That's why I always go through my insurance. They don't try this kind of stuff (in my experience) when they have been contracted through a company that will stop using them over one complaint.

Do people not sign contracts for moves?? I've moved a few times in UK using different moving companies and there's always a written contract saying that company X will move me on day Y, for Z amount of money. Why would a licence be necessary to do that???

Yes. Those will generally be significantly pricier. These kinds of problems happen when folks try to minimize cost

But if someone is trying to minimize cost so much that they don't sign a contract, then surely they are not going to care if the company is licenced either?

Yes. But if someone without a license pulls this kind of a scam in a regime with licensing and the victim complains to the police, the police can catch the scammer on basis of operating without license. Conversely, a licensed operator is unlikely to scam.

They absolutely should.

However, some people are much to trusting and don't think to.

Moving can be dirty business.

Okay, but why limit the number of licenses?

Since these licenses are limited in number, yet sold freely, it's clearly a gatekeeping scheme.

To my knowledge, licenses aren't limited anymore and it's fairly easy to get an interstate license.

State licensing varies but generally, it's easy as well.

I'm more surprised she got away with $100 for 7 violations.

I imagine her case was one of the less worrying things to make it to court that day, a genuine oversight by a woman who is doing great things for business, why 'throw the book' at her? Particularly if she is okay with getting all the paperwork signed.

Had she stole people's possessions in some scam seven times over with there being no evidence or some other reason why the theft could not be proven then I am sure the book would have been thoroughly thrown at her with the maximum penalties possible for not having the paperwork for moving across state lines.

Great read. I particularly enjoyed her advice:

> Make it right. The standard reimbursement for moving breakages used to be 6¢ a pound. If we broke a 10-pound table, we’d be liable for 60¢, but that’s not right. So we used to give an “I’m sorry” box to customers, with a coffee mug and gift certificate in it, along with fixing whatever we broke. It made a big difference.

I remember flickr said something like "offer support in a way you know won't scale"

The unfortunate corollary to this is, but when you do finally scale, the care goes out the window.

Is this the advice that nascent Google took? Considering they are infamous for not responding to support requests at all now that they're big, it appears they did put in place a support system that didn't scale.

I'd say that "Don't Care, rely on random public people" scales rather well.

That's how all retail businesses are approaching as well- get rid of as many people as possible, and replace with fixed cost machines. It's a great advantage from the business side of things, but really sucks with regards to people.

Google's Project Fi has good support - live chat, phone, email, and social media. Likewise with YouTube TV.

Of course you're paying $35+/month instead of the usual $0-10/month for most of their consumer products.

My understanding is Google’s support philosophy is the same as everything else: only do things that scale massively; as 1-to-1 support can’t scale, it isn’t included except for services where it’s required to be successful.

That seems like a bizarre way to pay for damages considering weight and value are not correlated at all.

Well, they are highly correlated for tables. Or are you selling 10lb tables for 60 cents?

And weirdly, I can’t think of anything I can buy for 6cents a pound.

Adjusting for inflation (using the only date in the article, 1991), that's $0.11/lb in today's money! Hmm, still can't think of anything I can buy for that amount.

Bubble wrap maybe.

Tap water comes to mind as being considerably cheaper than that. I'm pretty sure that gravel and sand are, too.

Three of the less breakable items you could move!

Indeed, and I can't imagine someone paying a moving company to transport any of those three rather than leaving them behind and buying new tapwater, gravel, or sand at their destination!

The X per Pound is just the standard liability insurance. If you have valuables, or items that would exceed that there is a process where by you can buy additional insurance, but the X per pound is normally what is included in the Movers Fees.

More of a CYA for the mover than protection for your property.

Quite nice to see a local and someone I know personally on HN. A while back at my suggestion we had her at the Lansing Startup Grind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yfyesm-Cu8

I hired these guys and they never showed. I was in contact with them every hour, being reassured they were just running late. Eventually they stopped responding.

By midnight I gave up and threw half my stuff on the curb and UberXL’ed my clothes and small items to my new apartment.

Unfortunately I had a flight at 3am so couldn’t handle a cancelation, which is my fault.

They're franchised. You didn't hire "these guys", you hired one of their franchisees. I'm sure the company would love to know about your experience.

I've used them twice, first time had a great crew with a lot of hustle. Second time, they had doubled prices and the crew was slow and inefficient. I planned to do two trips in one day, but they only made one. I'll never use them again.

Finding the right employees is the key to the continued growth of most businesses, but especially in this vertical: 99%+ of the experience of hiring a moving company is directly related to the people who show up at the house to do the hard manual labor.

PS. Set aside some extra cash to give these people directly if they exceed your expectations (at least in the US, not sure about 'tipping'/etc. elsewhere).

Back in 2002 one of their trucks (St Louis MO) parked and blocked my car at a Quiktrip as I parked in the parking lot to get breakfast. When I came out I saw my car was blocked. I could not find the drivers and asked about it in Quiktrip and nobody knew, some even laughed at me. I was 29 minutes late when the drivers finally showed up to move their truck without even as much as am I'm sorry.

I never used their service but they were illeaglly parked when they blocked my car.

It has been along time since. I suppose I can forgive them.

Can confirm, the moving industry is still a 'good ole boys network.' I've seen quite a few well-funded startups in the space fail and one of the culprits (among many) is usually because the movers are very skeptical of new services.

Seems like a lot of her early success was choosing the right franchisees. It's notoriously hard to grow a moving company. Would love to know more about their process back then.

There are probably some lessons from McDonalds in that - having restaurants run predominantly by teenagers, yet swamping the world. I assume the secret is a strict system plus solid leading staff who make sure the underlings stick to the plan?

This is great. Tongue in cheek TLDR (said with a lot of admiration as a divorced mom with two sons myself):

How to accidentally become CEO of a multi-million dollar moving company: Get divorced. Support your two sons' desire to make a little extra money by taking out an ad for them as local movers. Keep getting calls after they leave for college. Run with it.

The bit on a moving license was interesting. One one hand, I'm sure there's a decent (if opaque) rationale behind it, whatever it is.

On the other hand, it was clearly a burdensome and annoying regulation to jump through, although clearly not crippling.

How could government constantly reevaluate law to determine a careful balance between cost and benefit?

It's actually a good industry to look at for any economist looking to study regulation affects.

In the 80s they deregulated the industry which led to a proliferation of shady movers and scams. Since the 80s they've been slowly adding back in more and more regulation.

The interesting part though is how the established companies limited the number of licenses that could be issued. That kind of regulatory capture is why "more regulation" vs "less regulation" is an overly simplistic lens through which to view situations. The nature of the regulation can be very important in protecting incumbents, although there is probably a certain quantity of regulation where the inherent complexity of compliance becomes a similar barrier.

> How could government constantly reevaluate law to determine a careful balance between cost and benefit?

By not turning every discussion into a culture war or a question of whether the government should exist at all. Those two approaches are phenomenally effective at distracting people from effective government.

The 80s medium duty F-series really has a timeless look. You could replace the G-vans with modern equivalents and that 80s F-series would fit right in.

>they found seven moves done without moving licenses

Um, WTF. I wouldn't be surprised by this in 2017 in some city but back then?

It was done by the state police.

It's maybe implied that a competitor encouraged them to inspect her books.

Licensing that's effectively restricted to industry incumbents is not at all uncommon, see stories about unlicensed hair braiding, etc.

The moving business is all about licensing. What state lines are you crossing, what are you moving, what states are your trucks certified in (emissions etc), how many guys do you have in the truck...

But that's more of a DOT/Commerical trucking thing, not a "moving license" thing.

Movers usually own and operate the trucks

Right. They'd be under DOT rules about commercial trucking which are stringent and micro-managerial enough that I don't see the need for separate licensing.

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