BC Alberta Mover employ a scam that got…
BC Alberta Mover employ a scam that got us and I want to share to hopefully save others the same experience. In the end I suppose we did not research them well enough and were rooky at moving, so we paid the price but beware about the practice I now describe. You start by calling moving companies for a quote. Here the companies were pretty much the same in that they asked question to get an estimate of the size of you home, number of rooms, and overall content. Some are fairly detailed but BC Alberta Movers were not very precise and I wish that had set the alarm bells for us. Their quote was not the cheapest but the research we did do found no blatant problems so the mind set was to pay a little more to get a reliable Mover. It did not work out that way. Move day & crew arrives, commences loading and at about 75% full they start complaining that there is more goods than expected. They don't know how bad the overload is but once scaled they will adjust based on weight. What are you going to do? It's the moving companies responsibility to estimate accurately but they did not come out to have a look and I don't think many do. At this point you're pretty committed; you need to empty the house and cannot stop the move, so we gave the benefit of doubt to the Mover and hoped for a not-too-painful adjustment. But it was painful, almost 3x the estimate!!
Here's the catch: You must not estimate/negotiate on weight. It's not hard to estimate the "size of truck", man power, and time to do your move, but weight is nearly impossible. As an old truck driver from years past I know moving trucks are not nearly as heavy as most commercial vehicles. They do NOT have weight concerns thus you should get a quote based on volume and hint: most 3 bedroom homes around 2500 sqft will fit nicely in a 26' Moving Van.
The Mover themselves were polite & worked hard but they were contractors. They were effectively put in the middle between customer and broker (BC Alberta Movers), so they came off as a bit of a victim themselves, which served the scam nicely.
Conclusion. Negotiate on volume not weight and I would not trust BC Alberta Movers again. They took no responsibility for their poor estimating, penalized us severely, and not even a Sorry!