Complaint Review: Hopkins and Sons Inc.

Our move from Delaware to Utah involved picking up our stuff in May, storing them in Delaware for two months and then moving them to Utah. The agent that provided the service on the Delaware side was Hopkins and Sons, Inc, an agent of Atlas Van Lines. This move was my worst nightmarish moving experience. I would not recommend Hopkins and Sons to anyone. The office staff, including the owner of the company was terrible from start to end. They tried to take advantage of us and charge us significantly more than the agreed upon price. In the end, I had to pay about $700 more than the agreed upon price, just to get my items back from their hands.

We had agreed before the move that the price (for the long-distance part) was going to be fixed (Assured price estimate), no matter how much the items weigh. The guy named Tom Montgomery came to our house to determine the estimate. I showed him everything that will be moved in detail. I showed him every cabinet, closet and drawer that had items in it. I showed him everything in detail. We had several furniture items that we would decide to move or get rid of (depending on the difference in price). I wanted a separate estimate with and without those items. A few days later I was given an estimate with all items except those undecided items. Then I had several phone conversations with a woman named Amber Garnesky about including several different combinations of those undecided items. This resulted in several different estimates. We finally decided what we will move and what we will keep out of those undecided items, after considering the incremental price changes for those items. At this point, I wanted to sign an Assured price estimate, because I heard about so many horror stories from people that were hit by huge price increases once items are on the hands of the movers. I and the woman called Amber Garnesky signed this Assured Price Estimate. The estimate was for $4600, for the long distance part of the move. Tom Montgomery had estimated our items as 9,000 something pounds. When the time came for us to move items from the storage, I contacted Amber Garnesky. She all of a sudden changed the estimate from $4,600 to $6,300!!! And despite the fact that I called her on Wednesday to tell her about the date that we want the items and the destination address, it took her to get back to me 2 days and she conveniently sent an e-mail several minutes before she leaves work on Friday so that I would not be able to ask her about the rip-off that they had in store for me. I immediately sent a reply message but she answered on Monday that our items weighed 12,000 pounds and the price difference was due to that and they can't do anything about it, despite my constant re-iteration that the estimate was "Assured Price Estimate." Apparently there was nothing assured about it.

I then called the company and demanded to talk to the top manager. The owner is a woman by the name of Cathy Grieco. She looked at my file and in the end said she could do nothing, as the estimate was based on the original weight estimate, and she further claimed that we moved additional items from the estimate and accused me of being a liar. Apparently Garnesky did put all of the intermediate estimates in the file in a disorganized fashion so that it was difficult to prove what was what. The detailed inventory list that was created on the day of the move was very cryptic and it accounted for the many separate pieces of the disassembled furniture whereas the inventory list that was attached to the Assured Price Estimate did not list the furniture as separate pieces. Grieco said I would be welcome to move the items by another mover but there would be an additional charge of $400 for that. She was very rude, unprofessional, and just out there to take advantage of me because they had my items in their possession.  I was fed up and I said I would be willing to go with the highest of those estimates, which was about $5,300. Even at that point they tried to squeeze additional money from me, by adding a fictitious charge (with a cryptic description) to the estimate for about $40. I of course objected to that, and she had to backtrack on it.

They were out to hit me with additional charges at every stage of the move. The local part (into storage in Delaware) was based on a time estimate. I kept track of their arrival and departure times and they charged me 2.5 hours more than the actual time to inflate the price by close to a couple hundred dollars. Then when I objected, they said it was travel time (!!!) which I know that could only be -at most- 40 minutes round trip (more likely 30 minutes). They only reduced this by half an hour and I had to pay for most of this overcharge.

They had given me 2 months of free storage, but during those two months, I received statements a couple of times that charged me for storage. I objected to those, and they removed those charges. However, all of these experiences together shows that they are the kind of company that take advantage of the fact that they have your items in their possession and you have no choice but pay the exorbitantly high overcharges that they hit you with, just to get your items back.

In short, I would never recommend this company to anyone. The A+ rating on BBB mislead me to believe that this was an honest and serious company but then I learned that Cathy Grieco was on the board of the local BBB. The fact that they are in this business for 60+ years is because there are no repeat customers in this business. They rip you off, and then you are forever gone from that area.