Across USA Moving And Storage failed to make good on promises Dallas Texas

Across USA moved my household goods from Bastrop, TX to Seattle, WA with a pickup date of August 08, 2008. They did not live up to their promises and provided poor service.

The sales agent Donna told me they only use Across USA employees and not day laborers. This was even written in an email from Donna. When the truck showed up to pick up my goods there were three employees and a day laborer. The day laborer had no idea what he was doing and was generally slow, lazy and had a bad attitude. At the drop off the only employee was the driver. The other guys were day laborers. They got the inventory screwed up beyond repair by reading the numbers they found on stickers from a previous moving company. The result is that there is not way to know if we received all of our boxes.

Donna all but assured me that my goods would be loaded onto the truck that was bound for Seattle. We talked about this in the context of not wanting my goods to go to a warehouse because of the increase risk of breakage due to the goods being loaded and unloaded so many times. A few days before the move date I learned that my goods would be going back to the warehouse after all. By this time it was too late to find other movers.

When the goods arrived in Seattle I found that a number of items had been broken. There was an antique chair with solid wood legs one of which was nearly snapped in half. It took a lot of force to break this chair. Also ruined was a nice cherry table. The table had been stood on end in the truck with insufficient packing which scratched the wood badly and dented the corner. I even pointed out to the movers when they loaded the truck that I thought they needed to pad the corners of the table. They said it would be fine.

The quote I got from Donna was not even close to the final price I paid. It was nearly double. When the movers arrived to pick up my goods, the foreman had me sign a waiver effectively canceling their obligation to the quote they provided. He also had me sign a bunch of other papers with fine print legalese that would have taken a long time to read. I effectively had no choice but to sign. I was already a day late getting out of town.

They then packed in boxes and padding several goods which I approved of for packing. I also approved the price of the packing material like boxes and pads. What I did not know was that there would be an additional labor charge on top of the packing supplies and on top of the quote which they had me sign away.

To add insult to injury, they over protected stuff that could have been wrapped and they did a poor job packing stuff that really needed good packing (see table issue above).

Did I mention that they hit me with a fuel surcharge even though the quote said the price included fuel charge? Yep. The form I signed waiving my right to hold them to their estimate took care of that.

In addition, they did not give me a copy of one of the forms they had me sign. The form did not have the carbonless copy page on the back.

On top of all this, Donna got the move date wrong. I discovered this the day before the scheduled move when talking with the driver. I had the pick up date as August 7 and had made plans to drive to Houston after the movers picked up the goods. Donna and I talked about this so I assumed the quote had the correct date on it. It turns out the quote that I rubber stamped had a pickup date of August 8.

All in all it was a terrible experience.


See Report: #359510 for a similar problem

Ky
Seattle, Washington
U.S.A.

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