My boyfriend and I were shopping around for options to move our furniture (1br, 1ba apartment - not much to speak of) from New Jersey to Florida. These guys called with the best estimate we could find - about $400 cheaper than everyone else. Xavier, the sales rep, was really nice and mentioned that since the company was based in New Jersey and moving to Florida is a really common job for them, it would be no problem at all. We gave him an inventory of everything we would put on the truck, and they quoted us a price based on the cubic feet they believed our stuff would occupy.
Moving day comes, and the truck was scheduled to come between 9-11AM. We called them multiple times and they showed up around 3PM. They had included free boxes and wrapping for our TVs and glass tabletop in the estimate, but when the guys arrived they mentioned that we would still be paying extra for them. After everything was wrapped and on the truck, they mentioned that our stuff (literally the exact same inventory as was on the estimate - not a box more) took up about three times the space they quoted us, and that our price went from ~ $1300 to ~ $3500 - this after the gentleman told us he was giving us a heavy discount and it should actually cost $4500.
What's amazing is that he told us that his office does this all the time, and being the truck driver he deals with the surprise and anger of people being horribly misquoted all the time.
Seeing as we had budgeted for around this estimate months ago and did not actually have an extra few thousand dollars just lying around, we were advised by the driver to call our rep and see what we could do.
We were on the phone with these guys for about 2 hours. We were put on hold, hung up on, told we would be called back and not actually called back - this game went on for a while until finally we got the number for the owner of the company, who told us we were merely one of 300 jobs this month and our money was "no good" to them if we didn't like what they had to offer. So, everything came off the truck and they left by 7PM. We told the owner, Safi, that we wanted our deposit back and he said he would gladly give it to us.
Needless to say, since this was supposed to be done by early afternoon that day and became an ordeal that lasted until evening and ended with our belongings still in the apartment we were supposed to vacate the next day, it caused huge problems with our move. We ended up having to store our furniture in NJ until we could find a way to bring it down, since we couldn't coordinate anything within our budget at the absolute last minute.
Now, a week later, we called about our deposit on a Saturday. They said there was a note on our account about it and asked us to call back on Monday, today, and we are playing the same phone game with them as this is being written. We ended up on the phone with Safi again, who hung up on us immediately. We called him back, he said he'd call us back in ten minutes, and now are calls are being screened with no option to leave a voicemail.
Long story short, they're going to promise you savings - however, now that budget is going to a lawyer. Do not, under any circumstances, give these people the time of day unless you don't mind playing hardball for your money.
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