Worst Customer Experience Ever
Chris
Submitted this review about
Xpress Movers
Review made Live: 12/16/2012 12:00:00 PM
This is the first customer review I've ever written because I usually am not moved one way or another to bother writing one. However, the level of incompetence, unprofessionalism, and stubbornness I experienced during my move with XPress Movers and in the year following has swayed me to post this review on every site I can find. I provide a chronological account of my experience with XPress Movers below.
The confirmation e-mail for the day of my move stated that the scheduled start time was 7am, and I planned my moving day around that. When no one showed up by 8am I tried calling both the sales rep and the main office and was put through to voicemail all morning long. I left a message with the office and no one ever returned my call. Finally at 9:30 the driver called and said they would be there at 10. They had no knowledge of a 7am start time whatsoever.
The movers that showed up were two very slim college-aged kids and an equally slim mid-twenties Eastern European guy that spoke broken English. The latter was the supervisor and driver. Once they arrived, I asked them to please wrap my couch in shrink wrap so that it didn't get dirty or torn during the move. They said they would and I found out later after they had loaded it onto the truck that they didn't. Luckily it didn't get damaged, but other things did, which I will get to. I had a glass lamp table that the movers placed at the edge of the truck bed before they decided to load the mattress, and knocked the lamp table down onto the concrete while doing so. Somehow the glass didn't shatter, but the base and lamp pole were broken and could not be repaired. The cost of that was about $150. The mattress they were loading when they knocked down the lamp table was soiled with some sort of dark gray substance from sliding it along the edge of the truck. It cost me $180 dollars to have it cleaned.
I informed the sales rep ahead of time that I had a desk that would need dismantling and reassembling to move, and I was told to leave it alone - the movers would bring tools and do the disassembly/reassembly themselves. On the day of the move, however, they first attempted to move it without taking it apart and put several deep gashes in the walls of my roommate's condo out of which I was moving, which he subsequently had to repair. After they failed to move it that way that they decided to take it apart and asked me for a phillips head screwdriver, which my roommate had to provide. In the process of taking the desk apart, they broke several small pieces on it, including most of the screws that held it together. As a result, they were unable to correctly put it back together again, and I had to spend part of the day after the move fixing their errors. I was unable to completely repair it, and parts of it are just being held together by gravity at this point. The desk was $1000 when I purchased it.
The movers also decided to move my leather-backed desk chair by putting it upside down on a dolly, and dragged part of it along the ground in the process, tearing the leather off of one of the corners. I couldn't repair the leather on that part of the chair. The chair was $150 when I purchased it.
Before they moved it, I informed the movers that an ottoman of mine had some stuff stored inside it and asked if they could keep it upright so its contents didn't spill. They said that was fine. However, most of the contents spilled out in the truck because they stood it up on its side, and they wound up bringing me a few things at a time from inside it that they found on the truck at the end of the day.
On top of all this, they took three hours longer than the estimated time (a total of 7 hours, only 30 minutes of which was travel time), which cost me an additional $420 above the estimate I was given, and charged me over $50 for boxes to wrap my TV (which the last movers I used wrapped in blankets from the truck for free) and a couple of small mirrors I could have taken myself if they had told me it would cost that much to wrap them. I wasn't told the price of these additions until the end of the day.
To put this level or incompetence in perspective, a year earlier I moved from western MA to eastern MA (a 2 hour drive) using a company called Ideal Movers (whom I highly recommend if you're out in western MA), and two men were able to move the same set of possessions into the same house I moved out of on this move in 5 hours of load/unload time and didn't leave a scratch on anything, nor did they charge me for extra packing materials.
On the day of the move, I asked the movers if insurance was included, and the guy who spoke broken English simply said yes, with no further information or options. In retrospect this was my one error, not reading the very fine print in one spot on their website which basically says they can roll the truck full of your possessions down a hill, destroy everything inside of it, and as long as they deliver the pile of rubble to the destination, the most they could owe you is a few hundred dollars. This is sadly not far from what they did to me. Each time the movers broke something they told me "just contact the office tomorrow for reimbursement". No caveats mentioned.
On the day after my move I contacted the office about reimbursement. I listed all of the damaged items, and was told to go have my mattress cleaned first, and include the receipt for it along with the claim form for the damages. No mention of partial reimbursement was made at this point, or any time prior to it. I did this, and was sent back a reimbursement offer of $100 for the over $500 dollars in damages I claimed (I didn't include the desk because it was still useable and I was trying not to be obnoxious. In retrospect I should have included it).
I contacted the owner, Annie Andreeva, and said that this was unacceptable. She replied saying that XPress Movers didn't legally owe me any more than $100, since their built in coverage (which no one mentioned to me ever during the course of my interactions with them) was 6 cents per pound. I'll point out that this was mentioned only *after* they told me to go spend an *additional* $180 to clean my mattress, on top of the already unreasonable amount of money I'd given them. She also proceeded to condescendingly tell me that the mattress getting soiled was my fault, because I didn't tell the movers to wrap it. Simply astounding.
I went back and forth with Annie for over a year, and I have never interacted with a business owner with such little business sense. As you can see from other reviews on this site, I am by far not the only one that has had experiences with XPress Movers like this. It's amazing that the owner can't see that reviews like this cost her so much more in lost business than simply reimbursing the people whose goods they damage. It's simple arithmetic. Annie's idea of good customer relations is to refer to you as a "valued customer" in the email in which she tells you that it's your fault your goods were damaged, and that XPress Movers is not legally bound to reimburse you.
In any case, this move of three rooms' worth of furniture with a total of 60 minutes of travel time wound up costing me a total of $1200, plus over $500 in damages ($100 more if you count the desk). My previous move of the same belongings with a total of *5 hours* of travel time cost me $1600, and no damages. You can imagine what I would have been charged if I had used them to do my original move.
It's clear that XPress Movers' business model is to offer very low rates by hiring completely inexperienced movers at minimum wage, and to spend the rest of their resources on legal counsel for denying damage claims. Stay far away from this company. Don't let them near your possessions, and understand that the lower rates are far outweighed by the damages they will cause.
P.S. A quick Google search will show you that XPress Movers is not Better Business Bureau accredited. I wonder why.
