Complaint Review: Bluebell Relocation LLC - Clifton NJ

Bluebell Relocation should be avoided at all cost!! They provide amateur moving best characterized by carelessness, contempt for expensive possessions, a crew that has a bad attitude (including several who showed up completely stoned and stinking of marijuana every morning), and an extremely high breakage rate due to totally careless packing and equally careless handling.

But worst of all, they are con artists!! They have a systematic process of bilking customers that begins with their very detailed house inspection to tally your inventory of everything needing to be moved. This gives you a false sense of confidence that they are thorough and precise. No!! They do it to get you to sign their original estimate and contract. It's the first part of their scam.

1) Price Gouging: Once the trucks are loaded, they call very upset and tell you that you have FAR MORE FURNITURE than was estimated, and you need to pay a very stiff extra price for the additional truck space needed to move you. It's all about extra truck space that they supposedly already carefully calculated. They did. They're just lying to bump up the price significantly!!

2) Third Party Markups: If you have chandeliers or other items they consider "Specialty Items," they bring in an allied company called MSS, and here is where you start to seriously get the estimate and contract bid-up to a much higher price to allow for the elaborate crating of more expensive or delicate things. My biggest chandelier was a Magnum Opus project with a crate bigger than you've ever seen that cost over $5K! So were four other chandeliers put into expensive crates because they didn't want to damage them. Too bad, then, that upon delivery the incompetent Bluebell team who took the crates out of the trucks and into the house put one of them in the house upside-down! Even with huge arrows on the sides of the crate pointing to "This Way Up!"

3) Unacceptable Breakage: Bluebell's totally careless packing is their first huge mistake. They put heavy things in with delicate things, they pack too loosely, and they inadequately protect more breakable items. Their second big mistake is how roughly they handle packages, dropping them off of the back of trucks onto the ground or slinging them into the back of shuttle trucks. We had far more breakage in this one move than I had collectively in the other 8 moves in my lifetime.

4) Lost & Misplaced Items: They packed and loaded the trucks in such a way as to separate the parts to many pieces of furniture so that it was next to impossible to find all the pieces to King Size Bed Frames or pieces of furniture and electronic component systems once they were off-loaded. Some pieces remain lost forever and no recourse.

5) Grossly Off-Schedule: Bluebell was almost a week late getting the trucks to leave for our new home in Vermont, so everything I'd carefully planned in terms of other vendors to hook things up and get the place ready were thrown completely off ... not to mention my own schedule and that of my family.

6) Terrible Customer Service -- Lies with No Follow-Through: Despite being clearly in the wrong, Bluebell management -- including its owner Ricardo -- knows how to avoid customer complaints. When I finally tracked him down, he wouldn't acknowledge any errors or sloppiness, saying we should have bought the ridiculously expensive insurance that cost about $5K and had a $1.5K deductible. Meanwhile his customer service person, Sandra Baker, kept saying she'd help but never really followed through.

I've moved many times around the country in my life. It's always a pain to move, but I've always dealt with companies and people who knew what they were doing and respected their customers. Bluebell clearly does not, and they seem hellbent on staying in the business flying under the radar as long as they can scamming people and doing a terrible job.

Do not use Bluebell!!! Any more expensive moving option is worth the cost of dealing with honest, competent professionals.