Delivery in Stamford, CT worked great. Unlike PODS, you only need one parking space free, so there was no hassle with delivery if you live in a busy apartment complex. Everything fit in the cube with plenty of room. We did a pretty shoddy job bubble wrapping our art, and expected some to be broken along the way, but it was all very much intact!
Our troubles with U-Pack had everything to do with delivery from the Pico Rivera, CA Depot:
Like a lot of people, my wife and I were moving to a new city without an apartment yet, so we just had ABF deliver the Cube to Los Angeles. Once we found an apartment, we scheduled the U-Pack to be delivered and was told it would be there the next day by someone from the Pico Rivera depot.
On the day of delivery I got an email from ABF Corporate with a bill for ~$400 for the delivery. I wasn't expecting to be charged to have it delivered, but chalked it up to the fact that we didn't give an address... It was unclear, and they didn't mention the cost on the phone call the day prior.
I then noticed that the email said it will take 2 or more business days to ship. This was horrifying, because we had movers coming that day to unpack our cube!!
So what we figured out was this:
The Destination Service Center didn't deliver to our new address (even though it was just a 25 minute drive away), so they were going to ship it to a different Destination Service Center and charge us ~$400 to do that. It wasn't a delivery charge, it was a gigantic charge just to swap the container to a different storage location.
Things that could have been better:
- When we didn't specify a delivery address in the first place, we should have been warned that there could be huge extra charges for delivery in case you're outside of the Destination Service Center delivery range.
- Somebody at the Destination Service Center let us schedule a drop-off even though they were unable to deliver. And then no one called to say, "whoops, sorry, that's not going to happen. etc." We had to call around and waste our time trying to figure out what the heck was happening.
Thankfully we were able to move fast enough to cancel the movers and get ABF to cancel the shipment to the new service facility. We ended up paying movers to drive out the ABF in Pico Rivera, pick up our stuff and bring it to our apartment. It was pretty horrible and stressful after the exhaustion of moving was already wearing on us.
And one last thing to note for LA residents is that from the research I did: it is illegal to park shipping containers on the streets, no matter the signage. And they don't give permits for shipping containers, either. read more