Worst moving experience of my life. Don't ever use:
* Aladdin Transfer & Storage
* Wheaton World Wide Moving (a.k.a Wheaton Van Lines)
* Bekins (same company as Wheaton)
And don't do business with:
* John Edward - salesman with Aladdin
* Brad Messer - owner of Aladdin
In Summary:
Contracted Pick Up Day: Fri, 7/7
Actual Pick Up Days: Fri, 7/7 & Mon 7/10
Est. Delivery Window: 7/11 - 7/17
Actual Delivery Date: 7/26 - 11 days AFTER the END of the delivery window
The Gritty Details:
We hired movers for our move from CA to CO. Aladdin was the local pick up company and Wheaton was the national company coordindating the move. Aladdin sent John Edward to do an in-home inspection of the apartment but not our 10 x 10 storage unit that we told them we had. They just estimated based on the description of the contents.
The movers from Aladdin/Wheaton were supposed to arrive on Friday, 7/7 between 8-10am for pick up. My wife and I were to leave the next morning to hit the road for CO. (In hindsight, I should have given us a little buffer between pick up day and when we left town.)
The movers showed up at 9:55am Friday morning. Unfortunately, the truck was too small to load everything so they were only able to load the apartment's contents but not the contents of the storage unit. They weren't able to get a second truck to pick everything up that same day so after some arguing with John and Brad, they assured us the unit would be picked up the next day: Saturday. So we gave them a key, the code to the storage facility, and hoped for the best.
The next morning, Saturday, my wife and I loaded up what items we were taking with us in our 2 cars and hit the road. We didn't hear from anyone all day. Late in the afternoon I made some calls but just got voicemail.
Finally, around 8pm Saturday night, I got a text--not a call--from Brad about the storage facility being "closed". The gate closes after 4pm but you can still get through that and into the building with the code I gave them. "Well I wish I would have known that" was Brad's response. This is the OWNER of the company. More texts and phone calls, during one of which Brad hung up on me for swearing at him - I guess I offended his delicate ears - until Brad agreed to pick up the storage unit stuff the next day: Sunday.
Sunday comes and goes and, once again, we don't hear from anyone. We left a few voicemails for Brad but none were returned.
Monday morning I got in touch with Tyler Greer, our move manager in the corporate office, and gave him the details of the weekend. He said he would take care of it and sounded sympathetic. Tyler was the only person in this whole mess who tried to work with us.
Brad finally called back and said the storage unit contents were picked up on Sunday. John also called and said the same thing. HOWEVER, later that day the manager of the storage facility emailed that the movers were there loading things up. So John and Brad both lied to us.
After 4 stressful days of calls, texts, and emails, our stuff was at least finally loaded up.
Several days later we were informed by Tyler that they wouldn't be able to deliver everything until 7/26, 11 days after the end of the original delivery window. He was able to give us a discount of about 15% off the final price of the move because of all the trouble.
Our stuff finally arrived on the 26th and in pretty good shape. With everything else that went wrong I was a bit worried. The movers who delivered the stuff - Colorado Hi-Tec Moving & Storage - were very professional.
Brad Messer and John Edward clearly don't know what they're doing and don't seem to care much about clients. And neither of them are men of their word.
From Brad in an email: "Sorry about the delay in getting your household goods delivered to you but this is a common practice in this industry in the summertime." During a phone call, John said something to the same effect.
Okay, first of all, knowing that other customers are also getting screwed doesn't make me feel any better. Secondly, if you KNOW you're going to have this kind of trouble, either book less work, or at least give your customers a realistic delivery window. We would have packed differently if we knew we would be waiting over 2 weeks for our stuff to arrive.
Moving is stressful enough when things go well without the added stress of dealing with incompetents. read more
