Green Van Lines- An unethical moving service
Sable
Submitted this review about
Green Van Lines
Review made Live: 7/19/2009 10:16:00 PM
Green Van Lines sounds great on the phone. In reality, it is just the opposite. In addition to extra charges ($550 for ¡§guaranteed delivery¡¨, $515 for careful wrapping and unwrapping antique furniture and, and 10% fuel surcharge), they lied just about everything, damaged our belongings, and destroyed private property. Specifically, there are three major problems: lying about their business practices, questionable weighing of the vehicle, and the actual delivery being a nightmare. If you are looking for an honest company, you should avoid Green Van Lines. They are reckless, expensive and unethical.
Green Van Lines lies about their service. We chose Green Van Lines because they said that they never sub-contract. Initially I was considering another moving company, ¡§Guy¡¨ (I was told that he is the owner) directed me to a website and showed me that it registered only one owned truck for this other company. Guy told me it would be impossible for them to move us without subcontracting, having only one registered truck. And that Green Van Lines on the other hand, owns all their own trucks, and employs all their own moving staff, and would be a much better choice. In our experience, it was not true.
Our first surprise was on day one when they arrived in a Budget Rental truck (they originally promised that our belongings would not be loaded, transferred and reloaded to other trucks.) We should have known something was wrong, but we gave them the benefit of the doubt.
The second red flag was that the truck had been weighed the day prior, in New Jersey. (Truck weight is used for calculating shipping costs. The empty truck weight is subtracted from the loaded truck weight and the difference is the weight to be transported.) Please see the two scanned weight tickets (attached as a PDF file). The first ticket from New Jersey is very minimal. The two tickets had nothing in common and there was no way we could verify it was the same truck.
There is no way to know. The original estimated shipment weight was 3,416 lbs based on a detailed inventory list (we had almost no furniture except for two antique chairs, four bar stools and two antique coffee tables.) The final calculated weight was 7,500 lbs. We had our doubts. ¡§Guy¡¨ calmly stated to us that each weight scale is different and can result in a 5-10% difference, and that it was completely legitimate to weight the truck in another state at a totally different weight station on a different day.
The third major issue was on the actual delivery date. Our belongings arrived on a truck owned by ¡§North American¡¨, not Green Van Lines. There were two movers with the truck, none of them was employed by Green Van Lines, and they had a local ¡§daily for-hire¡¨ person to help out. When the truck arrived, we saw how they had so crammed in our belongings that they couldn¡¦t even get the boxes out. The truck was repositioned several times and all three doors were attempted before unloading was possible. No walk ramp was present and a ladder was needed to reach the trailer door. When they turned the truck around, it hit and damaged a nearby building. When my husband expressed concern about this damage, one of the movers (who was the brother-in-law of the truck company) threatened my husband's life.
Unsurprisingly, they wanted more cash or they would not unload our belongings. Then they threatened to just leave our belongings on the side of the road. They asked for $300. After negotiation, we paid $225 in cash. We received a hand written receipt without any company logo. While they unloaded our belongings, we saw that boxes that we marked ¡§fragile¡¨ and ¡§this side up¡¨ were crushed and up-side-down. Several items were broken, including one item, which was broken right in front of us during its forcefully unwrapping. When I tried to support and protect our fragile antique furniture during its unwrapping, I was accidentally slashed with a box cutter. After only partially unwrapping our furniture, they left all the torn cardboard and bubble wrap piled up in our new home. It was the for-hire guy who helped us to clean this mess. The movers did not follow their inventory list. Even when we mentioned that there were more items wrapped by Green Van Lines that were paid to be unwrapped, they just stormed out in a hurry with their new cash.
After our delivery, we told Guy what had happened. He seemed genuinely concerned and said that he would get back to us regarding our unfortunate delivery experience. We never heard back from him, even after our follow-up email. The only thing we can do now is to share our experience so others can avoid the same mistake we made. If we had known how they operate, we would not have chosen Green Van Lines.
