It’s moving day for at least one family, as I see the Rhino Moving Pros van parked outside a home. Moving can be a very stressful experience. I have known people who paid others to pack all their boxes, thereby making moving almost stress-free. However, I have never done that myself. I don’t know how military families survive with all the moving they do. I have only moved five times during my 70 years. I lived at home during my college years since my parents lived in a college town — Stillwater, Oklahoma, home of Oklahoma State University. So, my first move was to an apartment in Longview, Texas, where I started my first job as an accountant. I moved two more times in Longview, once to a house when I got married and then to a different house when I got divorced. Then I moved to a townhome in Tyler, Texas, after I retired. Lived there three years and then moved to another townhome in Addison, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. None of those moving experiences were particularly pleasant. One time, a mover broke a window moving a piece of furniture up the stairs. Another time the movers were six hours late. When I moved to Addison, the low-cost movers (I should have known better) packed the furniture in such a crowded way that one piece gouged a depression in my solid walnut dining table, even though it was wrapped in cotton matting. When did people first start using moving companies? Let’s find out.
According to the article “The history of the moving industry” at internationalvanlines.com, per the American Moving & Storage Association, the moving industry employs over 123,000 people nationwide. The annual payroll is approximately $3.6 billion. It makes the moving business one of the largest industries in the country. Small businesses make up about 90% of the industry. About 47.8% of moving companies have less than five employees, and only 8.5% of companies employ 100-plus people.
According to Wikipedia, per the U.S. Census Bureau, 40 million United States citizens have moved annually over the last decade. Of those people who have moved in the United States, 84.5% of them have moved within their own state, 12.5% have moved to another state and 2.3% have moved to another country.
The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest household goods shipper in the world with the Personal Property Program accounting for 20% of all moves.
In the U.S. and Canada, the cost for long-distance moves is typically determined by the weight of the items to be moved, the distance, how quickly the items are to be moved and the time of the year or month when the move takes place. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the price is based on the volume of the items rather than their weight. Some movers may offer flat rate pricing.
The use of truck rental services, or simply borrowing similar hardware, is referred to as DIY moving. Typically, the parties who are moving borrow or rent a truck or trailer large enough to carry their household goods and, if necessary, obtain moving equipment such as dollies, furniture pads and cargo belts to protect the furniture or to facilitate the moving process itself.
The moving process also involves finding or buying materials such as boxes, paper, tape and bubble wrap with which to pack boxable and/or protect fragile household goods and to consolidate the carrying and stacking on moving day. Self-service moving companies offer another viable option: the person moving buys space on one or more trailers or shipping containers. These containers are then driven by professionals to the new location.
Hunter-gatherers
According to Kevin the Mover’s June 10, 2015 article “History of the Moving Industry” posted in “I’m a Mover, Moving Industry News” at blog.hireahelper.com, since early man owned nothing more than a few animal skins and a handful of hunting implements, it made the task of moving bearable. In fact, right on through the entire hunter-gatherer era, man was constantly on the move, so he had to live simple and travel light. Otherwise, he’d have to hire movers pretty much every day, even on Sunday. And who would be able to afford that? Funny how the time when man moved the most was also the time when a moving company just wasn’t going to make any money.
With the dawn of agriculture, man began putting down roots. And with this switch to settling in one place for a while came the trend of making bigger homes and finding more stuff to put in them. Unfortunately, the time was still not right for the moving industry since no one had invented the wheel yet.
Ancient moving equipment — the Travois
People did move, though. And when they did, they used a wheel-less, ox-powered contraption called a travois, two long wooden poles that would drag along the ground behind the family ox — or cow or donkey. Tied to the supports between these poles would be the family’s belongings. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done. It also left two nasty ruts in the person’s front yard on both ends of the move. But since there was no claims process in place, the whole issue could be ignored.
The word “travois” is French for travail. Yeah, a name that means “painfully difficult or burdensome work” sounds about right for an invention that would spur on the moving industry.
Even after the wheel was invented — and in turn the axle, then the cotter pin — the travois was sometimes preferable to a wheeled cart, considering there was no such thing as a paved road yet.
As mankind moved forward, he created the hell of hierarchical society. It was here that the elites — who owned the great majority of the wealth — would have assistants, helpers and slaves move all their gold goblets, silk robes, marble sinks and exotic animal pelts for them. This generally worked out in the elites’ favor since there were no scales around and thus, no way for the movers to prove that their shipment weighed anything.
Hundreds of generations of unregistered, unofficial, non-unionized movers carried on, in hopes that one day their descendants might have a better life.
Conestoga wagons
The beginning of the 19th century saw the introduction of the covered wagon to the American landscape. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Conestoga, which is ironic since the Conestoga played no part in the great westward expansion.
This beefy vehicle was, however, a big part of the budding transportation industry. And by big we mean big. These handcrafted wooden suckers could carry as much as six tons of freight — and without the help of air suspension or even air in the tires since neither suspension nor tires existed yet.
The floor of the Conestoga wagon curved upwards at each end to prevent the wagon’s contents from shifting or falling out. Meanwhile there were gates on both ends of the wagon, held in place by a chain and able to be raised and lowered, much like the tailgate of the pickup truck your friend insists is good enough for him and his crosstown move.
The Conestoga was great for carrying corn, barley, wheat and other such crops from the farms to the cities and on the way back, hauling certain commodities only available in the cities, like fashionable clothes and decent beer. But these wagons were too heavy and clunky to be of much use for long distances over rough terrain. Westbound travelers instead used covered wagons that had flatter bodies and lower sides than the Conestoga SUVs. The wagons’ trademark white canvas covers apparently looked like the sails of ships from a distance and were sometimes called prairie schooners. This seems akin to calling today’s tractor trailers highway barges.
Wagon trains
According to the article “The history of the moving industry” at internationalvanlines.com,
the moving industry originated in America. It started way back when colonists and newcomers traveled to populate the west. Some speculate that the first do-it-yourself moving companies were immigrants that favored the use of those great wagons from way back when.
They would use the wagons to pack their items and relocate to areas that weren’t as populated. Immigrants would travel in groups alongside the trails. Each group consisted of about 3-5 wagons mainly so people could help each other. They would assist each other with packing and loading the goods on and off the wagon. They also traveled in a small group for survival. Groups like that had a target on their back from Indians, diseases, wild animals, etc.
According to Kevin the Mover’s June 10, 2015 article “History of the Moving Industry” posted in “I’m a Mover, Moving Industry News” at blog.hireahelper.com, surprisingly, covered wagons had a lot of the things today’s tractors and moving trucks have. While there is no record of spare wheels on board the wagons, they did sometimes carry a spare axle in case one broke along the rough, jarring ride. If that spare axle broke, the people moving would have to find a tree — preferably oak or maple — and cut themselves a new one.
If we happen to blow out our spare tire, all we have to do is get AAA to come help – which, come to think of it, may end up taking longer than finding a rubber tree and making a new tire ourselves.
Covered wagons also had wooden brakes which, interestingly, never caught fire. Today, trucks have brakes made of high-tech materials which, interestingly, do catch fire.
Your typical covered wagon would have a water barrel, roughly large enough for a two-day supply. Your modern sleeper cab with toilet and shower also has a water tank — which amounts to roughly a two-day drinking supply for the dog that the driver leaves in the cab all day in the broiling summer sun.
Out on the prairie, wood for cooking and making spare axles was scarce. So, the people driving these wagons had to keep a supply on hand — in a sheet of canvas tied to the underside of the wagon. Also stored in this precursor to today’s belly box were food supplies, animal feed, extra clothes, camping gear and bedrolls, and extra campfire fuel in the form of wild buffalo chips — which may sound disgusting until you have to dig into the dusty, dirty, smelly, oily depths of a modern driver’s belly box for the pack of emergency flares he swears are in there somewhere.
Even with that canvas belly, people driving their covered wagons west hundreds and hundreds of miles needed the help of extra supplies, guides and protection. From this need came the wagon trains, giving our pioneers strength in numbers and giving us the expression “Circle the wagons” since that is exactly what they did when threatened by wild animals, criminals or — in rare cases — Indians.
Today’s equivalent of the wagon train is difficult to nail down. Convoys are just a form of testosterone-spilling fun for truckers who have been on the road too long. Truck stops serve the supplies purpose but obviously the “train” part is missing. Maybe the CB is the closest thing we have to the wagon train, as truckers use it to communicate with other truckers in need of something, as well as warn each other of the dangers of cops, road hazards and open weigh stations — and in certain cities, criminals, but never Indians.
It is said that a family traveling by covered wagon from Independence, Missouri to Oregon along the Oregon Trail in the 1840s was on the road between four and six weeks. Which is about how long some people now have to wait for their van line to find a driver for their shipment or find a truck for their shipment — or in the height of crazy season, just find their shipment.
Transcontinental railroad
With the transcontinental railroad construction boom that ran from 1830 to 1860, railroads became America’s preferred mode of long-distance transportation for passengers, freight and household goods.
During this time, local delivery companies hired for long-hauls would first transport the customer’s goods by horse-drawn wagon to a warehouse, where the goods would be packed and crated for shipping. The crates would then be taken to a rail depot and loaded onto a train car. Logistics quickly dictated that moving companies should set up shop along the tracks so they could load directly from the warehouse onto the trains. At the destination, the crates would be unloaded — again into a warehouse sitting right along the tracks — to eventually be delivered to the customer’s new home by another local delivery company.
Most of these early delivery companies, known as wagon firms, offered their household moving services as a sideline to their primary business of local transport and keeping stables for horses and carriages for hire. For a short time, the covered wagon era and the train era overlapped. During these awkward years, the wagon firms tried another side business — selling horse chips to the wagon trains. They had little success.
This process of bringing a person’s goods into a warehouse before or after train transport turned out to be the beginning of the moving industry term SIT or Storage In Transit. SIT usually involves a lot of stuff sitting out on the warehouse floor for a short but annoying period of time, and somewhere along the way, the warehouse crews, sick and tired of all the extra work, began pronouncing this term in an angry, slurred fashion which gave rise to the four-letter word people often use today for stuff in their lives they can’t stand.
Age of the gas-powered motor
During World War I, in the effort to support our fighting nation, the number of paved roads and motorized trucks using them increased rapidly in the United States. This, in turn, made road transportation cheaper and easier, and in 1919 Ward B. Hiner, founder of the American Red Ball Transit Company, became the country’s first interstate mover. He saw that moving goods from city to city in motorized vans instead of by rail would eliminate the cost and trouble of crating furniture and reduce the number of times that furniture had to be handled. It would also cut down on the growing use of that four-letter version of SIT.
By the mid-1920s, motorized vehicles had become an integral part of the moving industry. The government also continued subsidizing new highway construction projects — partly due to the government’s desire to limit America’s dependence on the powerful railroad industry and partly to get their money’s worth from the suddenly filthy rich Halliburton Highway Co.
At this time, however, the moving industry consisted only of a number of individual companies operating independently. These companies had no problem finding customers for local moves or even for long-haul contracts. But finding customers for out-of-state return shipments was nearly impossible. The only way an out-of-town driver could find a return shipment was to ask a local moving and storage company in the area if it had a shipment going his way. Some companies established move boards in their offices where they posted available shipments for out-of-town drivers. Good intentions, to be sure, but an out-of-town driver actually finding a shipment going to his next destination was about as likely as winning the lottery. Or at least the 50-50 raffle.
The inefficient move board system left drivers idling for long periods of time waiting for a return shipment that might never come — in which case they would return home with an empty truck, cutting into their profits and making a lot of their wives mighty angry. It is believed this is how going home with no shipment on board came to be known as “deadheading.”
But then in 1928 a group of independent moving companies formed an alliance wherein they could work together sharing information on jobs, keeping all of them busier and more profitable. This alliance came to be known as Allied Van Lines, the first moving company network of its kind in the United States.
Government regulation and deregulation
Starting in 1933 President Roosevelt began introducing a series of domestic programs known as the New Deal. These post-Great Depression laws and executive orders were meant to restore the economy by regulating competitive practices and promoting fair competition. One of these was the Motor Carrier Act of 1935.
This act stabilized pricing for moving services, protecting the industry from getting run over by the still-powerful railways. It also prevented larger companies from offering volume discounts, so that smaller companies could survive the competition. Unfortunately, this act could do nothing about the angry wives of non-Allied drivers.
In 1948 Congress passed the Reed-Bullwinkle Act. This allowed companies that were operating in line with the Interstate Commerce Commission to establish collective rates and have full immunity from antitrust laws. This allowed the industry to grow in strength and prosperity for the next 30 years. It also made one of the law’s co-authors the second-most-famous Bullwinkle in U.S. history.
But in 1980 Congress voted to deregulate the trucking industry. It wasn’t long before the number of moving carriers in the country increased from a few hundred to over 20,000. Price and service level options grew widely, as did the number of unfamiliar companies to hire. This led to the trend of consumers referring to the trucking industry by a slightly different and rather obscene name.
And not without merit, as many new companies were in fact illegitimate. And many of them, both legit and otherwise, provided poor service through bad business practices. Complaints poured into the Better Business Bureau. By 2001 the moving industry was ranked sixth on the list of most frequently researched businesses with 274,388 inquiries. By 2006, that number had reached 1,109,342, with “those trucking movers” becoming the fourth most checked out group of professionals.
The U.S. General Accounting Office decided that “the primary responsibility for consumer protection “lies with consumers to select a reputable household goods carrier, ensure that they understand the terms and conditions of the contract and understand and pursue the remedies that are available to them when problems arise.” In other words, in their report titled “Federal Actions are Needed to Improve Oversight of the Household Goods Moving Industry,” the GAO said that the consumer was responsible for putting the bad guys out of business.
Containerized moving and storage
In the 1990s, the established moving industry saw the birth of a new competitor, commonly referred to as containerized moving and storage. New companies and existing freight companies were now offering to transport containers that were loaded and unloaded by the customers themselves as an economical alternative to full-service moving. Some of those companies soon enhanced their containerized moving by providing professional loading and unloading services. As a sort of counter-offensive some traditional movers and van lines have developed an “in-house” containerized moving program or have chosen to partner with existing containerized moving or freight companies.
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