Best cross-US shipping company

I’m moving west to east later this month and thinking about shipping my belongings rather than packing them into the car with me. I have five or so fifty-pound boxes of stuff, around 28" cube each. My buddy might ship his stuff along with mine, so there could be twice as much volume and weight total.

From your experience, would you reccommend a company for affordability and/or quality? Has anyone used the “PODS”, the large crates you fill at home? We’re looking to spend as little money as possible.

-wm

I’ve not used PODS, but UPS might be surprisingly expensive. For your five boxes each weighing 50 pounds and measuring 28" on a side, and from San Francisco to a hypothetical location of New York City, the total would be $630.

Same with FedEx Ground is looking like $410. Residential address may inclue a surcharge. They also have something called “Multiweight” service for multiple packages going from Point A to Point B as a single shipment that might be cheaper. You’d need to call FedEx or your local Kinko’s for more info.

PODS looks like they’d be far too large - the small size is 8x8x12 feet.

The PODS thing seems designed for local storage. Instead of taking all of your stuff to a self-storage facility, they bring the container to your house, you fill it, and they take it away and store it. The advantage for them is that they can pack the containers tightly. Plus I suspect they charge you everytime you ask to access the container. And from the advertisements, the containers don’t seem sturdy enough for long distance transport.

What about having the stuff shipped by a freight service? I’ve never done this myself, but when my brother and I were looking into having some of our mother’s furniture shipped, he mentioned “common carrier” as one option. I googled “common carrier shipping” and got a number of hits, e.g. http://www.avxa.com/ (no connection with that website, no clue whether it’s reputable etc.).