There’s an old saying that stuck in my head regarding the moving business and it goes like this: “Someone once said that the bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price”, and it couldn’t fit an industry like the moving business any better.
It’s understandable that customers want to get the best price, but the best price in moving is never the lowest one. So let’s look at what it takes to run a moving company so we can better understand their pricing.
What many people don’t realize is that there are enormous costs involved in running a moving company. Consider the cost of fuel and how it has increased drastically over the last several years, and now imagine the cost of running a large moving truck and how much fuel it can consume even over short distances. And then you add in insurance. The insurance costs are one of the largest expenses for a moving company. The insurance companies see what the moving companies do as a higher risk, and charge for that type of coverage accordingly. Next you have the moving vehicle itself. A fully equipped quality moving vehicle will run a little over one hundred thousand dollars. Now imagine a moving company that has to maintain a fleet of them. Advertising, the stranglehold of a company that wants to make sure customers find them when looking for a local moving company. Have you ever wondered how a company shows up at the top of a web page after you’ve completed a search for a mover? In some markets, a moving company can pay as much as $20,000 a month just to show up in one of the top three spots on a web page search. And finally, there’s the labor costs, the payroll for the people who get the moves and the employees that work on the moves. This is probably the most important expense for a moving company. To ensure you’re using quality people, people you can trust, people who will serve your customers with high standards, you have to pay a lot more than minimum wage.
So the next time you’re looking at moving quotes and you find yourself leaning towards the lowest quote on the table consider this. If you pick a mover based on price alone, you’re probably going to pay a lot more for your move in the long run. And the lowest price mover is probably cutting a lot of corners to get you that low low price. Day laborers and cheap labor are the most obvious signs of a cheap mover. There’s no loyalty in cheap labor, not to the moving company and certainly not to you the customer.And you’re handing over every personal belonging you’ve accumulated in your life to these movers. You won’t know the people showing up to do your move, but you’ll know you’ve paid for the cheapest ones when you let the lowest moving quote win you over.
Another aspect of the lowest bid is that it’s easy to give you a low bid over the phone. But unless it’s binding, it’s more likely your costs will go up with that mover on move day. And once that mover has all of your things loaded on their truck, you’ll find yourself willing to pay more just to get those things off the truck at your move destination. moving companies near me