Quoted 1700, final bill 3300
Brandy
Submitted this review about
Big Sam Transportant
Review made Live: 8/9/2009 11:35:00 AM
I received what I thought was a very reasonable quote from them, guess that should have been my clue when they were 1,000 less then all other moving companies. We signed the agreement, gave the deposit and were not told when the movers would arrive. I had to contact the company over and over again for an estimated time, we were told between 7-10, the movers arrived after 12:00, with a cross country move losing these hours delayed our entire trip, thankfully we were flying or we would have missed our flight. When the movers finally arrived they were no in uniforms, which I would have expected from a professional moving company, and it was almost immediate that the driver was telling us that it looked like it was going to cost about double what they quoted us. I was told that the movers would disassemble all items, that was part of the estimate, this was not the case, we had to rush around taking apart our items so they didn't charge us extra. By the time they truck was loaded we had incurred 200.00 in moving supplies, keep in mind they didn't pack anything, just loaded already packed boxes. At this point the driver tried to talk us into going by square footage rather then weight and gave us an updated estimate of 3300.00. We decided to stick with weight because it was a 2 bedroom apartment but we had discarded an entire bedroom set prior to them arriving and had no applliances. Our original estimate was for 3400 pounds, suddenly the mover was estimating that we would have about 10,000 pounds of stuff, this was impossible. We stuck with going by weight, asked to be present at the weigh and driver informed us we would have to go from SanDiego to LA to be present for the weight, this is illegal and untrue they could have gone to any weigh station but they knew since we had already been delayed by hours we couldn't spend another 4 hours driving to LA. The driver left his tools behind, when we called him, 15 mins after he left our location and he was at another customer's home picking up their items, no weight of just our items was ever done.
We were told our items would be on their way to Georgia the following Thursday, we received a call on Thursday saying our items were leaving on Friday, called on Monday no responce, received a call from the driver the following Wens stating out items would be arriving Thursday, we finally received our items on Saturday. We had requested to be present at the weighing and were told by the driver that they would not be weighing out items and we had no right to request they do so and that our balance due was 1900.00 and they wouldn't deliver until they received the balance, according to our quote we owed 325.00. We called the office and was screamed at and hung up on numerous times by the Manager/Owner of the company Karen. After 13 days of living our of duffle bags and hotels we couldn't afford another week of hotels and were threatened by Big Sam if we didn't pay them our balance we "might" get our items the first week of August. Totally exhausted and frustrated we had no choice but to agree to pay the 1900.00. When the driver arrived he informed us that he couldn't get his truck close enough to the door and would be charging us another 500.00 to complete the move. At this point they knew they had backed us in a corner and we had no choice because we needed our belongings. We received our belongs an antique radio was missing, a cherrywood dining room set was chipped and scratched and the majority of our boxes were crushed or damaged.
Original Quote: 1685.21
Total Paid: 337.00 deposit
1095.25 paid on pick up
1900.00 paid on delivery
500.00 for shuttle
3832.25
Paid above quote: 2147.04
This company will tell you they are a member of the BBB, they are not this has been confirmed with the BBB who also informed us they have had 19 complaints since receiving their license in 2007. We also contacted the Federal Motor Carriers Safety Administration and they also have numerous complaints for this company, all along the same lines as above.
