Misleading and Careless
Eleanor Zoller
Submitted this review about
Noahs-Ark-Movers
Review made Live: 9/15/2011 12:22:00 PM
We first dealt with Frank who gave us our estimate over the phone. We had never used a moving company before, and from his questions I assumed he was giving us an estimate for a standard 1 bedroom move, with some boxes of clothes, kitchen things, etc. His questions suggested this: e.g., "Will you be moving a lot of kitchen things?" When I told him we had some but not a lot, it turned out he didn't add ANYTHING for these into our estimate! We later received an itemized inventory of furniture, but since we'd talked about other things as well (books, for example) I assumed the estimate also included a standard allotted space for boxes. But Frank let me continue to think that: When I called at one point to ask whether bringing 2 bikes would change our estimate, he said it might but that we might have fewer boxes of books than we had anticipated. He never mentioned that he hadn't added ANYTHING for books, even when I told him we were academics so it would be unlikely we'd save anything there. At that point what could have been miscommunication turned into plain dishonesty.
Our move was estimated at 2880 and came to nearly 5000. By waiving our fuel surcharge Jude kept our cost at 4500 - still almost twice as much as we expected to pay. I was almost in tears on the phone with him. The problems didn't end there: at unpacking they bordered on the absurd. It turned out that the packers (led by Cesar) had left out all numbers in the 70s from our inventory, so if these items had been missing we would have had no way to prove they were there to begin with. The movers at the far end also had a different version, with item # 154 not listed on theirs. (It was hard to tell what 154 was on ours, but there was something written on that line.) But the movers insisted that they had the original and I had just a copy, so theirs must be right. I had to insist that I had a carbon copy of the original, so mine had to be identical to the real original. Crazy!
It was good we kept track, because after they announced that was all of our belongings from the truck I pointed out we were supposed to have 2 futon mattresses. They went back to check - and there it was! After they said that was really everything, we went through the boxes together and they agreed one was missing. They went back to the truck - and there it was! They also gave us a duffel bag of shoes and belts that wasn't ours, which they said had been in our storage space. We're still not 100% sure we got all our things, because some box #s were missing but some other boxes we received didn't have numbers. Since the total number of boxes came out right, we let it go - but again, since no boxes in the 70s were listed on our inventory (but we sent and received boxes in the 70s) it's possible other things weren't listed as well. Overall, the move left us feeling used, uncertain, and like the company didn't really care about our things. (They scratched a nice desk of mine, but since it already had some scratches they said there was no way to prove they had done it.) We felt like we were battling for our things & our money the whole way through, at every level of the company. In the end, despite the slight discount, Jude didn't really take responsibility for how everything shaped up.
