Complaint Review: Pro Movers Inc. - Santa Ana CA

I was a bit conflicted about submitting this review. I understand moves don't go perfectly and stuff happens. And, I actually liked my conversations/interactions with the men who moved my house. Hell, I bought them pizza since I know how it is to do manual labor all day. But, there was just too much that went wrong.

1. They were late. It was minor, but about 30 minutes late. But, I had live animals I needed to move, so telling me that you'll be here in 30 minutes means I needed to pack up my many live animals and prepare to go. As soon as I moved out, the landlord was coming in with a showing.

For context, once they arrived here were my instructions:  "Everything on the right wall of the garage stays. The stove stays. The dishwasher stays. Everything else goes."

2. I packed up the entire house and put the boxes in the garage. I also moved about half the furniture into the garage. So, they had 1 bed, 1 desk, 2 sofas, an exercise bike, a few reptile tanks and their stands, and a refrigerator in the house. It took three movers over 4 hours to load that up into the vehicle. I've moved before, and moving from my last house into this house took the prior movers considerably less time--of course, they charged by the hour here instead of a fixed price, unlike the last movers. They noted they had trouble with my fridge, which is reasonable. But, doesn't make full sense given the disassembly-reassembly process for the doors and bottom drawer takes 5-10 minutes. You can add 30 minutes of figure-it-out time and the numbers still don't add up.

3. The drive here should have been 1 hour--the traffic was good, I checked. It took them two hours to arrive. Again, being charged hourly.

4. Upon arrival, they forgot screws to my bed. So, I couldn't put my bed together.

5. One glass item was broken; a lid to a reptile tank ($40).

6. They use hand-powered tools to take apart and put together items. That makes everything quite literally about 5x longer to do--no good unless you're on the other end of an hour service. A power tool costs about $30 and makes packing efficient.

7. They finished at about 6:30 PM (and the company has the rule to double drive-time, so realistically they could have billed for 7:30-8:30 PM making it about a 9-hour move). Three men moving a pre-boxed house 1 hour away took 9 hours at $185/hr cash ($195/hr if you pay card). That's about 2-3 more hours than I would have expected based on my prior moves--I've moved about 20 times in my life and leveraged movers in the past, the last three homes were effectively identical in size.

8. I unpacked over the course of the week before I wrote a review, and here is what I found:

- a large selection of pots, pans, and cookie sheets (AT LEAST $200 since it was an All Clad set that, originally, was $1,000 to purchase)

- My vacuum was left/missing ($150)

- My mop system was left/missing ($30)

- Kitchen items are straight-up missing! E.g. I only have two short, 10 oz glass cups from my set. There was a set of 10! This means at least one box was left/missing. ($40)*

- My rock-solid computer desk that survived two prior moves wobbled at every joint like it was drunk. I was able to fix it, but I have no idea what on earth could nearly shake every screw out of this thing. It's almost as if it was disassembled and reassembled poorly with no clear reason for doing so.

- My 5-gallon water jug which holds all of my reverse osmosis/de-ionized water for my amphibians was left/missing. ($20)

- My hand-pump sprayer for the reverse osmosis/de-ionized water to spray onto my amphibians (poison dart frogs) was missing. ($20)

*  I have no idea what else could be missing. As I said, I had to move from one house to another on the same day, and the landlord had a showing scheduled for the same day.

In all, the prices were $185/hr for 3 movers (if you pay cash as I did, likely saving them 20-30% in taxes since we know how cash payments work) and the process took longer than expected, and I lost AT LEAST $470 worth of items (possibly more).

In summary:

- The guys were nice

- It took too long

- Stuff was lost/left/missing

- Stuff was broken

- It cost too much as a result of the above. I imagine had I gone with another mover I probably would have saved AT LEAST about $700-900 for time saved and not having to replace lost/broken/missing stuff.

This is really entirely inexcusable.