My Move & Cross Country Movers

$6000 of damage in an $8000 move

This is specifically for the company at crosscountrymovingcompany.net. US DOT 2626333, MC 937654, headquartered in Los Angeles. The name is very generic; that should have been a warning sign.

They talk up how much care they put into everything, as a justification for their high prices, but the reality is a little different. Moving from Minnesota to Virginia, I specifically asked them not to use a Chicago contractor, since I've had bad experiences with delicate tasks being done in Chicago before; they ignored me. Then they got me to sign an insurance contract that quietly didn't cover mold damage or damage to the internals of electronics -- and the Chicagoans put my stuff in a leaky warehouse for a week, resulting in $6000 of mold and electronics damage (plus about $500 for $25,000 of insurance that didn't pay out).

After that, Cross Country Moving Company dragged their feet for two months, eventually offering me $1500 of compensation -- but only if I signed a confidentiality clause! (After I posted reviews on Yelp and Google on 11/17/20, they called me on 11/18/20 to offer $2000, but still with a confidentiality clause.) But moving from Minnesota to Virginia with these people cost me $8000 in cash paid, plus $6000 in damage done and not compensated for.

(Some further points:

* I have three bookshelves' worth of books, so $8000 for a one-bedroom move wasn't a surprising price. Books are always heavier than you would hope, and long-distance moves are priced by weight.

* I had previously moved from Seattle to Minneapolis with the same company. That move had been on a timeframe so tight that several other movers had refused to even think about it, but Cross-Country Moving Company pulled it off with flying colors.

* The mold problem may have started in my apartment in Minneapolis, which was hermetically sealed against the Minnesota cold, and had low humidity, bad ventilation, and not much fresh air... but that doesn't explain the new water damage on some books and boxes when I arrived, nor how my woodcarvings, once fished out of their packing materials, were close to splitting. If olive wood is bone-dry and nearly splintery, that indicates that it's been in mold-friendly conditions very recently, and my carvings never felt like that back in Minnesota. (They feel normal again here in Virginia, too, now that they've had some time to breathe.)

* The movers they subcontracted to in Virginia were terrible. Four hours late with no explanation offered; then they refused to do a few tasks I explicitly told them to, and didn't seem to understand what "out of the way" meant.)