Allways Moving & Storage

Allways Moving & Storage made my family’s move from Dutchess County to Brooklyn extremely easy. The guys quickly and securely packed all of our clothes, toys, books, furniture, etc (including some antiques) and delivered everything the next day with the same speed and care. And to top it all off, they were on time and friendly.

Friendly on time but. Ask about minimum weight/​minimum cost. Get binding estimate if you can weigh and catalogue all of your stuff. it is a confusing business.

I hired Allways Moving & Storage to move the contents of my mother’s Manhattan apartment to the company’s storage facility in Kingston, N.Y. The verbal agreement was that the company was to pack up her household items on January 30 and drive them upstate on January 31. At 8 pm on January 31, while I was in the shower, the movers simply left in the middle of the job, leaving the apartment without giving me any paperwork, though they had promised me an inventory of all the items they were moving beforehand. When I called one of them on his cell phone, he said they were on their way back to Kingston and they had left because they weren’t able to start on time, which is ridiculous; they started at 9 am. Then he said it was because they couldn’t get into a back bedroom to pack; equally ridiculous. I had spoken to a manager at the company around 3 pm, he said the men were concerned that they couldn’t get into a bedroom where I was working on my laptop to pack and I said that was completely untrue, that I wanted them to pack up the contents of that room, minus the laptop, as soon as possible. Next I called the company’s headquarters and was put on the phone with a salesman, Mike Woods, who said the owner of the company was unavailable. He maintained that the movers had left because they couldn’t get into this back bedroom, because a building manager had ordered them to leave and because they had found bedbugs all over my mother’s couch and mattress. He said the movers said a bug jumped off the couch in the elevator, and the elevator man freaked out and started fumigating the elevator. He also said the movers had said the elevator man told them 30 to 40 units of the building were infested with bedbugs. He quoted the movers as saying all they had left behind were «some filthy, disgusting rugs,» which happened to be $ 50,000 worth of Oriental carpets. He implied that because my story was so different from that of the movers, I must be lying. I pointed out that as the men had left summarily, without mentioning bedbugs, an order to leave or an inability to gain access to a bedroom, and without leaving me a copy of the contract or any other paperwork, for all I knew they might have taken off to Mexico or Canada with my mother’s goods, conservatively estimated to be worth $ 500,000.
I called my bank and found out that the owner had charged $ 4,000 to my debit card without speaking to me about how much the job cost. I had given him the number so he could charge me after the move, but never gave him permission to bill the card without clearing the amount with me. I filed a fraud charge and stopped the card.
The next day, I spoke to the building manager and the elevator man. They told me there was no order to leave, no sighting of bedbugs in the elevator and no infestation of bedbugs in the building. Furthermore, they said no one had told the men there was. With the help of my lawyer, I got the owner of the company„ to agree to send the movers back on Thursday to remove the rest of the items and take them to a storage facility in New Paltz, as I no longer wanted to use Allways’ storage facility.
When they unloaded my mother’s couch and mattress, I saw no sign of any bugs. I had never seen a single bug in her apartment, had stayed their three nights and had no bug bites. At that point, the men changed their story to say they had seen one bug on the couch.
This episode caused me extreme emotional duress and stress. My mother is in a nursing home, and it’s bad enough to have to empty her apartment without movers taking off in the middle of the job — which would have taken them just 30 minutes to complete — and telling all sorts of lies about why they did it. The lie about the bugs was especially damaging as it almost caused the New Paltz storage facility to reject my mother’s goods. Thankfully, the manager there decided I was more credible than the movers when I explained that they had made the whole story up, presumably because the day had stretched on too long and they wanted to quit.
I ended up paying about $ 500 less than the moving company initially tried to bill me for because of my lawyer’s intervention and only because I needed to vacate the apartment as soon as possible and the two extra days to complete the move had thrown me completely off my schedule. I agreed to this amount just to get the job done, as it was already two days late. I still feel the company completely overbilled me – adding bogus charges like $ 200 to fumigate its truck because of nonexistent bugs and $ 685 for five hours of unpacking at the storage facility, though this took just three hours. The movers waited at the facility for an hour, but I should not be charged for that because I emphatically said I would not be there till 3 or 3:30 pm. All in all, a horrible experience and the most unprofessional moving job imaginable.

I used Allways to move last year. The crew arrived on time and did a great job. Our closing was late in the day, so we stored our belongings in the truck overnight and have them deliver the next day.