First, if you want professional, competent, careful movers who understand the emotional aspect of moving, these are not your movers on any count.
We have moved three times in the last 8 years. These were, by far, the nastiest, coldest people we have ever come across. Their salesman comes on as very competent, but as soon as there is a problem with the move, he disappears, and says there is nothing he can do. After we signed on with them and it was too late to change, we discovered the previous report on usacomplaints.com. They denied his story and all they could say was that he hadn't tipped the movers as well as he said.
So, here's our story.
The crew was fine. They are mostly young high school or college kids who are ok. They helped us pack and were fine with packing our delicate items. We have not yet totally unpacked, but we've unpacked much of our small items and so far only one glass and a vase are broken. The move out of our old home seemed to go ok, although they left a couple of boxes and when we called to have them pick them up, they were quite nasty. We were surprised, as things seemed to have gone pretty well until then. Eventually, the salesman came and picked up the extra boxes.
We had a problem because of timing with the sale of our home and the purchase of the new home, we had to put our entire household into storage for a couple of weeks. That's when the nightmare began.
The move out seemed relatively ok, except, as I said, for the last couple of forgotten boxes. It was the move in that went completely awry. First of all, they were moving so fast that boxes were placed without any thought whatsoever. At the end of the day, we were left with a total mess, so much so that they had to send people over afterwards to sort it out.
Two very valuable antique chairs had arms broken and their netting underneath ripped to shreds. They told us that they were broken because they were kept in the bosses' office. Now, why would they do that? A satinwood table was completely warped. Our furniture refinisher said it was because it was kept in an inappropriate environment.
In any event, back to the move.incoming items were supposed to be tracked as boxes were delivered, so that it could be confirmed that nothing was missing. They were moving so fast, eventually, we gave up because we couldn't keep track of what was coming in. When they were finished, they said they knew that some items were missing but they would be delivered within a day or so. There were 21 paintings, half of an antique billiard table, several other furniture items and some boxes—about 25% of our household goods—missing!!!
For six weeks, we were given the runaround. Of course, during that time we didn't know whether they were stolen, damaged, or what had happened. We would call, our phone calls wouldn't be returned. They would only say that someone in the warehouse had put them in a bin that was unmarked and they had to go through every single bin in the warehouse.
If we had been treated with respect and dignity, I probably wouldn't be writing this report. We have never been treated with such coldness and indifference. It was almost as if it was our fault that they had lost our stuff. Phone calls were not returned for days and we'd be told the owner was on vacation (when he had said he was working on locating the missing items). Eventually, they found the items and delivered them.
Because we are under renovations, we cannot open all our boxes. However, there may be still some missing items. We are not sure.
In the meantime, we worked on getting some recompense for the damaged items (Biedermeyer chairs and a solid satinwood dining table). Each time we called (and we made numerous calls to them) they would tell us that they had called their "adjuster" but that he was very busy and had not returned their calls. This went on for weeks. Finally, I said I'd never known an insurance company to not send their adjuster out to see damage within 48-72 hours.
At that time, they said the adjuster was the person who would do the repair work. When I mentioned this would be a conflict of interest, they pretended not to know what I was talking about.
Finally, we called and said we were willing to file a lawsuit. That's when we got a letter stating that because we had not taken their insurance (which we decided to not do after reading the previous usacomplaints.com report AFTER we had contracted with them), they would pay us 60 cents per pound for the damage to the antique chairs (worth $3000) and the table (worth $18000), a grand total of $186, for which they sent us a check.
As I said, beware of these people. Do not hire them. Do not deal with them. They are not to be relied upon. We can never guarantee that a move will be without problems. We are all human. The problem is that they cannot be relied upon to deal with you honestly and forthrightly, or even humanly, when there is a problem.
There are too many moving companies around for you to risk dealing with McAvey.
We usually would just mark such an experience up to lesson learned. But we feel strongly an obligation to warn anyone contemplating dealing with these people, having read the report of the previous filer and having been subjected to their incompetence.
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