The worst moving company of all time
I’d heard warnings about scammy moving companies, but having hired movers twice before I brushed them off. How bad could it be? Well… read, and judge for yourself.
In early July of this year, after I had accepted the offer to work at Remi but before I had figured out where exactly we were going to live, we decided to hire a door-to-door moving company to handle our move. We had a big house in Texas and a lot of stuff and didn’t want to move it ourselves. After shopping around, we got a quote from All American Moving Group to move 1000 cubic feet for $8k.
Try to visualize 1000 cubic feet in your mind… can all your household belongings fit in that space? How on earth could you possibly know that? Andrew the salesman assured us a 5 bedroom house shouldn’t have more than 1000 cubic feet. With so much else on our minds we said okay and paid the deposit.
Then we didn’t think about it for a month and a half. I started my new job, we listed our house for sale, and arranged everything else in our lives for the upcoming move.
Fast forward six weeks. A couple of days before the pickup date, the moving company called to confirm the bill of lading. Surprise surprise, this second guy was positive we needed at least 1600 cubic feet, and increased the price to $11k. I made a stink about this but didn’t want to deal with trying to get my first deposit back, so I grumbled, agreed to the new contract, and paid a second deposit.
At this point there were already a couple red flags we should have noticed. Why had no one come to our house to take an inventory? Why did they wait until the last second to make the second estimate? Why is even the second estimate non-binding?
Arranging the move was annoying enough that I just looked past all of that. I figured worst case scenario we pay up a couple grand more than we thought and it’s still mostly covered by my new job’s relocation benefit. I just needed to power through and soon everything would be settled in our new home.
The pickup date arrived. Movers came early in the morning and I showed them around the house. They got to work taping and packing and loading everything into a Penske truck.
Wait a minute, a Penske truck? Why wouldn’t they use a company branded semi? Whatever, I thought… probably not a big deal. They must have an explanation.
A couple hours into the packing, the crew manager Avi shows up. I didn’t know this at first but Avi turned out to be, without exaggeration, the most dishonest person I have ever met. I have dealt with phone scammers before, but nothing remotely at his level, and never to my face. I was completely unprepared for this.
The first thing Avi did was give me a long list of excuses for why he was so late — he had to drive all the way from Dallas the morning with the semi truck, but he couldn’t fit it into our community gate, so he had to go rent the Penske. Okay, that sounds like a bummer, and it explains why they’re using a rented moving truck. I showed him through the house and he took stock of everything.
Then he gave us the binding estimate. Turns out everything we had signed before this was non-binding, and he had free rein within the contract to set whatever price he wanted on-site. He said we had 2800 cubic feet of stuff, and it was going to cost $18k.
Oof. This was a far cry from the original $8k we agreed to. We put the whole thing on pause and told him we were going to need to figure this out. We were still naively assuming good faith at this point, so we called All American and asked if there’s anything they could do. We spent an hour on the phone and got nowhere. Peter the sales manager said he was trying to get us all the discounts he could but that we were already up against the limit. I asked Avi if we could just pay for the packing and send him on his way. He told us it would be another $6k for that, and repeated the sob story about coming in from Dallas with the semi that morning. You wouldn’t want to stiff a couple of hard workers who have nearly packed everything already, would you?
In hindsight, it is clear what I should have done at this point: I should have kicked Avi out of my house, disputed the credit card charges for my deposit, and either hired a new company or moved everything myself. We had time on our side, since the house hadn’t sold yet and we weren’t even planning to drive up to Utah until a week later. We lived near my wife’s family who would have helped me finish packing and loading everything. It would have been a minor inconvenience at best. But I wasn’t prepared for such an adversarial interaction, and didn’t want to drive a U-Haul cross-country. I did the math and figured, I’m already out $5k on the deposit, plus another $6k for the packing, plus at least $9k for another moving company or U-Pack pod… the math looked bad.
Anyway, the day went on roughly as expected after we begrudgingly agreed to the new terms. They loaded up the Penske. Avi said they were going to go unload everything into the semi and drive it back up to Dallas that night. “I have to bring my mother in law across the border in Brownsville, then I have a move in California this weekend, then another one in Alaska next week, then I’ll bring your load to Utah on the 9th”, he promised. He then told me to take a look around the house to make sure they didn’t miss anything. The loading crew seemed angry for some reason. I assumed it was because they were tired after a long day of hard labor. (This is a foreshadow.)
When I went upstairs, everybody disappeared. We were stuck with about 3 extra boxes worth of things that they didn’t load. Inconvenient, but we could send them up with my in-laws on their cross country road trip the following month.
The next day, after all the emotions of the moment settled down, we still felt very uneasy about the whole experience. I looked online to see what other people were saying about this company. Lo and behold, there were dozens of one star reviews of other people complaining about the exact same thing. How could we have missed this, I thought. I looked at the dates. All of the 1-star reviews were from the last two months — after we had paid our first deposit. Everything before that was a five star review.
Huh. How long has this company been around? When we were shopping around and told competitors about the deal we were getting, they said they couldn’t beat the price and that “All American is a great company”. LinkedIn shows employees for this company based in Tennessee from 20 years ago. But when I looked up the company registration and DOT number, they only go back to April of this year, and when I call customer service, the employees say they are based in Miami and were hired in the last few months. I still haven’t figured out the answer to this. My working theory is that the old All American Moving Group was either dissolved or went out of business, then a company by the same name reorganized earlier this year, banking on the trusted name to get new leads and cutting every possible corner to turn a profit.
Still, they had close to a hundred 5-star reviews on TrustPilot. I took a closer look.
My stomach sank. This was unmistakably the tone, sentence structure, and word choice of an LLM.
I needed a plan to make sure we didn't lose everything. The best I could come up with is to put an AirTag in the extra boxes the moving crew missed, and try to get Avi to load them before driving up to Utah. At least that way we could track the shipment.
I called Avi the next morning and explained that the movers missed some boxes. “No problem”, he said, “I’ll send you a driver on Thursday”.
He did in fact get a driver on Thursday, a man named Luis who called me that day and said he would come in the evening to pick up the boxes after they finished unloading a delivery in Conroe. I went to the house and waited. And waited… and waited, and waited. No one came. I called the driver and Avi probably 20 times each. “I’m on a plane,” Avi said, “and if this guy doesn’t show up I’ll get you a new driver when I land”. After hours of waiting, Luis texted and said he hurt his arm unloading the truck in Conroe and wouldn’t be able to make it to our house until the next morning. That was too late for us, so I told him “don’t bother” and gave up on the tracking plan. Just a couple more days and we’ll get our stuff anyway.
We drove up to Utah, moved into my parent’s basement for the weekend, and eagerly awaited our delivery the following Monday. On Sunday night, we called Avi. “Your delivery is coming tomorrow,” he said, “but I don’t know what time.”
Monday arrives. We call and text Avi, Peter, Luis, Andrew, anyone we can our hands on. No one answers. We call the customer service line a dozen times. They tell us, “Peter is in charge of your move, and he’ll call you back in a couple minutes.” He never calls us. The day ends with no delivery.
At this point we are in panic mode. Everything we own is in either a truck or a warehouse somewhere in the continental United States and we have no idea where it is, who’s in charge of it, or when it will arrive.
The next 10 days pass roughly the same way Monday did. I spend hours on the phone every day, calling and texting everyone at All American Moving Group that I possibly can, trying to get any information at all. We get pieces of the story here and there. Luis calls and says he was going to do the move but Avi never loaded up his truck, so he had to move on to the next delivery. Avi says the driver got caught with a suspended license in Oklahoma, so he had to get a new driver. I call Oklahoma Highway Patrol, and they say there are no trucks in their grounding area at the port of entry. Jose calls and says he is our new driver, the truck has a mishap and is now in Oklahoma City getting repaired. Peter says he forgot his phone was in airplane mode for several days and he didn’t get our texts. Avi apologizes and says he was in Colorado in the mountains with bad service, but that he would refund us $1k on delivery for our trouble. We get another number for Peter, but he said it’s his personal number and he can’t answer it during work but he’s trying to get answers for us on his breaks. Every text Peter sends is so illiterate it sounds like he is either on drugs or having a stroke.
After weeks of dealing with this, we are at the end of our rope. Should we just move in to our new house and buy new stuff? I talk to a lawyer. Can we sue them? Can we take them to small claims court? There must be some way to recoup some of the losses.
Out of the blue on Thursday, I get a call from Jose. He explains that he had been coerced into lying to us — our truck was never in Oklahoma. Avi owed him money from a previous move and never paid up, so he was done dealing with him and wanted to help us figure out what was going on. He then gave me the address and access code for a storage unit in Houston where Avi told him our shipment was waiting.
Suddenly I realize the extent of Avi’s deception. There was never a semi truck, or a warehouse in Dallas, or a suspended license, or a broken down truck in Oklahoma. For all I know there was no mother-in-law in Brownsville, and no jobs in Alaska, California, or Colorado. Maybe the original movers got angry and left early because Avi screwed them out of some money. Maybe Luis never hurt his arm unloading a non-existent move in Conroe. Everything I had been told for weeks is called into question.
I send the address for the storage unit to my wife’s family in Houston and instantly set off a chain reaction. They spring into action, driving down to the storage unit facility, calling the Harris County police, as well as the family friend who happened to be a high-ranking Texas police officer. Jose sends me his text history with Avi and a new phone number for me to call. I message the new number, letting Avi know the jig is up — I know he’s been lying, I know where our things are, and I’m going to sue if he doesn’t give us the lock combination.
Avi texts me back for the first time in over a week. After a couple of tense phone calls, he gives me the combination. My brother-in-law calls me on FaceTime and opens the unit. Everything is there. All of it. The nightmare is over. I can barely choke back tears. I never thought the sight of my treadmill would make me emotional.
The rest of the story is straightforward, thankfully. I fly down the next day, rent a U-Haul, load everything up, and drive it back with my brother. We unload the truck and finally move into our new house. I dispute the credit card charges and get the money back from my deposit. I’m still out the $10k I paid Avi in cash on-site but everything else is resolved.
What a crazy month it has been. I’m looking forward to being able to sleep at night again. Everyone (except the moving company) has been generous with us, from my parents letting us stay a couple extra weeks, to my in-laws in Texas loading the U-Haul, to my family and friends in Utah helping unload, to my teammates at work for picking up the slack when I had to drop everything to figure this out. I can’t imagine how much worse this would have been had I needed to pay for a hotel all this time and a second moving team.
I am looking forward to closing this chapter of my life. Next time I move, I’m just going to drive the truck myself. Consider this lesson learned.