Moving: Flat rate or by weight? (Need advice ASAP)

In My Humble Opinion
1

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my wife and I will be moving from Atlanta to the Boston area in a few weeks. I’m about to book the moving company and after my last nightmare experience three years ago, I’m worried about selecting a good company.

One of the main differences between companies is how they charge you: when I booked Colonial, they claimed that being charged by weight was best because with “flat rate” they could tack on extra charges. This is ironic, because the estimate I got from them (even after they sent an estimator to see all our stuff) was several thousand pounds too low and ended up costing us much more than at least one flat-rate mover had quoted. And they added extra charges! AND they put me through one of the most stressful experiences of my life!

Based on that, I’m more inclined to select a flat-rate mover this time. But I’d like the benefit of your experience, please, especially if you’ve done it both ways.

I’m also interested in recommendations for moving companies, as long as it’s not Colonial.

I intend to make a decision and book them as early as possible this week.

Thanks.

2

Why after your last experience would you want to take a chance on paying by weight? The savings can’t be worth the anxiety and aggravation involved.

3

That’s certainly my inclination, but I’m assuming that one experience isn’t necessarily representative. Others may have had equally bad experiences with flat-rate movers. Which is why I started the thread.

4

Every mover story seems miserable but each is miserable in its own way. I’ve always moved myself because the movers’ contracts are so horribly one-sided that it’s obvious they can’t be trusted. The only friends I’ve had with good mover stories seem to be that they packed themselves and rented a truck or used a pod. They paid movers by the hour to do loading and unloading. If I were to move again, that’s the route I would take.

5

Testify! You can even rent an auto transport that hitches to the back of the truck (YMMV) and yer on yer way!

Our last big move (Houston to JAX, FL), we hired a company to load the truck and it was one of the best experiences of its type that I’ve had. The manager came out first and gave an estimate after assessing how much crap we had. It seemed reasonable. The team arrived EARLY on moving day and started on the dot. They busted ass and were done in three hours!! The estimate was for five hours but we were only charged for the three. They complimented me for having so much of our stuff disassembled and wrapped up/boxed up. We weren’t sure how much to tip, so we flat out asked them and they didn’t jerk us around. Mostly, they were FRIENDLY! We offered to take them to lunch (pizza) and they were obviously tempted, but getting to their next job three hours earlier than planned was making them champ at the bit. A good experience all around and YES I realize it was probably a fluke of the universe.

6

An alternative is to rent containers and pack them yourself, for example:

7

Thanks for all the alternative ideas, folks, but we will need to have our stuff stored for at least a week or two while we prepare the house at the other end. So renting a truck ourselves wouldn’t be reasonable.

Also, I looked at the PODS/U-box idea and for various reasons it doesn’t seem the best option. (Although depending on what I hear from moving companies, I may revisit it.)

Still hoping for anyone with thoughts on flat-rate vs. pay-by-weight.

8

I didn’t even know “pay-by-weight” was a thing. We moved three times in the last year, twice interstate and once in town. Each time we went with the ones that looked over our stuff and gave us a binding estimate.

9

I can’t really imagine how pay-by-weight would work for a domestic moving service. It’s not as though the average person is going to be able to estimate what the contents of their home weighs. The moving company comes, looks at your stuff, estimates the weight… and if THEY estimate the weight wrong, they get to charge you more?

10

The truck is weighed empty and again after being loaded.

11

The part that was mystifying me was not the concept of how you weigh something. It was how it could possibly make any sense to quote something in this manner for somebody moving house.

Does an ordinary person have any precise sense of what the contents of their house might weigh? So presumably the moving company is looking at your stuff anyway to estimate the weight. So why wouldn’t they just look at your stuff and provide an estimate, why introduce the extra step, other than to scam you?

Unless you are transporting by air, what your stuff weighs +/- 10% seems far less important than what volume it takes up - what size truck is required, whether two customers’ loads can be combined in one truck.

12

My last move was in 2014, but I used to move every 1-4 years (I’ve been a renter since 1994) and I’ve never gotten an estimate by weight. I used the same company for the last 3-4 moves, and plan to use them again when the time comes; unfortunately (for you), they’re local (to me).

I’ve had wonderful moving experiences ever since I (a) started using the above-mentioned movers and (b) started being able to afford to have them pack me. I absolutely hate packing; for me, it’s the most stressful part of any move. I put my “delicates” in a tote bag and throw it in my car, but the movers pack everything else.

I like to unpack, though: I enjoy putting things away, and organizing a new space. The only downside to unpacking is the resulting sea of empty boxes that need to be broken down and disposed of (also, the metric ton of packing paper).

Same here…

13

Every company I have contacted (at least four in the past few days) has priced by weight and distance: so much per pound per mile. If you’re not moving interstate, perhaps they charge differently.

However, all this is moot now, because after getting quotes around $10,000, and thinking about a few of the comments above, I have gone back to the pod/cube option, and will pay roughly half that.

Thanks everyone.

14

Well, or less, if they misestimate in the other direction.

As someone who recently moved, the nice thing about paying by weight is that you can measure the weight of specific things and decide if its worth it to move that thing, or whether you should sell/give it away. We got a binding estimate and ended up moving some stuff that honestly we should have just left, because, hey, we already paid for it.

There are a lot of services where an experienced tradesperson will give you an estimate, but you actually pay based on the measurable amount of time/material/whatever the actual job ends up using. The estimate is just that: an estimate. It’s not totally unreasonable for a move to be like that. Like, based on our experience, we expect your stuff weighs this much. We’ll find out for sure after we weigh the truck.

Sure, you could put the risk of error on the service-provider, but risk isn’t free. You’re going to pay for the risk (and, on average, for the people who try to cheat the movers by, I dunno, hiding their free weights in a bunch of boxes marked “pillows”).

15

But conversely, if they show up and you say “I threw out my iron bed frame, but I now have 40 boxes of pillows that weigh the same”, that isn’t going to work if it doesn’t fit in the truck. Obviously fuel consumption is somewhat dependent on weight for road transport, but surely the use of 1 truck is the dominant element here. If your stuff is 10% heavier/lighter, but you are still using the same 1 truck in which any spare capacity is unlikely to be utilized, the actual cost of transportation might increase or decrease by 1% with fuel, but certainly not 10%. That’s why I can’t understand why it makes any sense to quote by weight.

16

BTW, I found out the hard way in my nightmare 2018 move that that form that says “binding estimate” doesn’t really bind them to the estimate they provided you. It binds them to that number IF the weight they estimated is right. They estimated my weight several thousand pounds too low (even though their estimator came out and personally inspected all our stuff, and even though I told him to increase the number of boxes of books), which ended up costing me thousands more than I expected. Moving companies suck.

Don’t expect language in a contract drawn up by one party to the contract to have the ordinary meaning you might assume.

17

The quotes we got that were by weight still specified the approximate amount of stuff and we couldn’t deviate broadly from it without penalties, which might include really big ones if they had to bring in another truck. I think the reason that both quoting a price per weight and giving a binding estimate probably work fine is that the density of standard residential belongings just doesn’t vary that much.

Like, some people have more books than others, but basically no one has a whole room full of pillows or full furniture sets made of lead or something that’s going to really throw the estimates off.

18

A little off topic - we are just now starting to get quotes for an interstate move. One thing every web site recommends is to research the moving companies and what I have found is that each one has many multiple horror stories in review sites. I am certain that satisfied customers don’t tend to post lengthy reviews, so there is that self-selection bias. But, how does one move past the feeling that every moving company is a flaming shit-show at least 80% of the time and that I am bound to want to shoot someone before I am done?

19

It’s a real problem. Movers can talk all they want about customer service, but for the most part, few people are repeat customers for any given company, so they don’t have much motivation to build up customer loyalty. And once they have all your stuff, what can you do?

About 20 years ago, I moved from one condo to another in the same development, total distance about 100 yards. When they pulled up the truck to the new place, they demanded full payment in cash before they’d unload. They hadn’t said anything about that before and I was stunned. They said if I didn’t have the cash, they’d drive off with all my stuff. I went to an ATM, but the amount they needed was more than my daily withdrawal limit. When I insisted that no one in their office had said I had to pay cash, they agreed to accept the balance on a credit card, but it was late in the day, after the office had closed, and it took a while to arrange. The whole ordeal only lasted a couple of hours, but it was my first experience with the leverage a moving company can have over you.

BTW, in 2018 Colonial offered me a small fraction of the money their mess-up actually cost me, but only if I agreed not to post anything about it on any Web site. I didn’t accept the gag order, but I bet a lot of other people do, so the bad news stories you hear are certainly not the whole picture.

That nightmare move was why I was dreading this move, and why I now feel a lot more relaxed and comfortable about having selected U-Pack instead of a conventional mover. I’ll have to hire local laborers at each end, but we have three days to pack and three to unpack the four cubes I’ve ordered. (I only expect to use three, and won’t have to pay for the fourth if I don’t use it.) I know exactly what I’ll pay for the cubes and moving ($4,400 for three), and have a pretty good idea on the labor (probably less than $1,000 total) and storage costs.

Conventional movers wanted about $10,000, so I should end up paying only about 50-60% of that.