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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

My movers took our pre-packed boxes, loaded them up, and were to meet us three days later six states over, in Montana. We couldn't use PODs because they wouldn't deliver to anything closer than about 90 minutes away.

Dumb us. Should have done that. It took the company two months to finally deliver our possessions. They filed bankruptcy during the situation and lost the truck for a while and we were about to have to go through the courts when they finally found some guy with a bad neck to drive and nobody to unload. They wrote our names with permanent marker on some things, broke others, a few boxes were never seen again. But the damage was within some contract provision I missed that said something about up to $1k to be submitted to them for coverage which half they denied.

Subcontractor movers. One of the worst "professional" experiences of my life.

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Is this an American thing? I never experienced such issues here in Eastern Europe. We called a guy with a truck and got it delivered as-is.

Partly it’s a long distance thing, especially at the lower end of the market.

Imagine you want to move your possessions to somewhere that’s three days drive away. Generally speaking, you need a team in location a to pack, a driver, and a team in location B to unpack.

In practice that’s hard for companies to offer entirely in house, so it winds up being subcontracted out, and then you have the problems you expect.

If you’re moving a couple of hours down the road, this doesn’t apply, it’s easy to find local movers who will load, drive, unload with a single crew.

As per yesterday's front page: it's the Accountability Sink that keeps on giving

I think I agree. I mean, I have only moved between cities without issues, not states.

So, what should I do (or who to call or trust) if I want to move between states? Say, from California to Montana?

Your best bet is to very carefully pack your own containers (possibly with direct help from a local mover) and work with someone to deliver those between states and then carefully unpack the container on the other end (possibly with help from local movers). Problem is that you have to be moving from and to a place with space for the containers to be packed/unpacked, and sit empty or full for a while while they're getting picked up according to whatever schedule you can arrange.

If you're renting and can't accommodate this process, I highly recommend only owning things that you can fit in your personal vehicle or can sell on one end and replace on the other fairly easily.

Thank you. Thankfully there are not a whole lot of belongings that require to be moved.

What was the cost before the troubles began?

$5k I think, it has been a while. It was enough that it was a lot and we considered multiple trips with a uhaul, but decided for the one-and-done

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