Moving is a risky and capricious industry. Moving companies and the people who own them are a conservative bunch, equally impervious to the grandiose aspirations of charlatans and to the self-serving dreams of the solid citizens who constitute their customer base. Companies that have risen above the subsistence level of a laborer with a truck are open boats tossing about in economic high seas. The business at this level is cyclical, capital intensive, and seasonal. That’s a particularly nasty combination bound to inculcate a certain degree of caution for those whose desire is to pass assets on to succeeding generations. Because of this innate caution, many of the early drayage companies are still around today: Wells Fargo began in 1852, Reebie Moving in Chicago in 1880, Holman in New Jersey in 1886, Security Storage of Washington, DC, in 1890, Bekins in Sioux City in 1891; countless others are still around and thriving. Wells Fargo of course, has moved on. Only 7 percent of all moving companies have more than fifty employees, 40 percent have fewer than five, and 96 percent are privately held. Another anomaly is the number of multigenerational families in the industry. Morgan Manhattan in New York City is a perfect and not at all uncommon example. Morgan was founded in 1851 by Patrick Morgan, an immigrant from Ireland, who got hold of a horse and wagon and started hauling household goods. Today Morgan Manhattan is a multimillion-dollar moving conglomerate still owned and operated by the Morgan family.
The industry goes much further back than the nineteenth century. Short-haul moving was well developed in Europe and America in colonial times. The picture of a drayman with his horse and wagon brimming with furniture is a familiar one. A bit later we’ll have large companies like Russell, Majors, and Waddell running the Pony Express and consolidating wagon trains from St. Louis for the trek out west. These companies collected fees from the dreamers, town boosters, religious whackos, misanthropes, psychopaths, and real estate hucksters who populated the immutable myth Americans call “the Winning of the West.” The wagon train companies were actually primitive van lines, and the man in charge of the wagon train was the latter-day long-haul driver. Even today, the sleekest $60,000 moving trailer is essentially only a wagon, and the most modern $150,000 tractor is still rated in horsepower.
Today’s moving companies grew in tandem with the development of trucks and roads in the early twentieth century. Up until about 1920, all long-distance moving was handled by railroads. Someone moving from New York to Chicago in 1900 would be better off selling everything and packing a suitcase. (It’s still the best way.) A household move back then required a shipper to contract with a drayage company at origin to pack everything in wooden barrels and crates and cart them to the station. There the railroad men would load everything into a boxcar for the trip to Chicago. Upon arrival, the shipper would contract with another drayage company to load the goods onto a wagon, deliver to the residence, and uncrate and unpack.
If you think moving is expensive and a hassle now, back then it was a nightmare. This is a point I’d like to emphasize: Moving today is cheaper, safer, and performed better than at any time in history. Let’s go back fourteen thousand years to our forebears crossing the land bridge in the Bering Sea. Moving was a dice-roll with death.
Sure, nowadays, every once in a while, something gets broken or lost. So? Nobody’s getting ambushed and cut to pieces on a frozen mountain pass. Nobody’s being forced to eat their mother-in-law due to a lack of forage. Nobody’s getting their wagonload of household goods set on fire by hostile natives. I’m a careful mover. I respect people’s stuff, but shit happens. You know why? Because you’re moving it. Leave the piano in the living room for three generations. It will be fine. You want to put it somewhere else, guess what? You’re taking a risk. Did you ever move your leg the wrong way and spend two weeks in a brace? Ever drop a cell phone in a toilet? Ever move a sofa to vacuum underneath and put a scratch on the floor? Most of us have done at least one of those things. I’ve done all those things. What I don’t understand is why, when a mover scratches a floor or dents a lampshade, it’s a justification for a ferocious freak-out at the entire industry. A quick lap around the internet will illustrate the dismal opinion of the moving industry by its customers. Most of it is vitriol, and some of it is, literally, insane. People go crazy when something happens to their stuff. The reaction, it appears to me, is generally overblown and not commensurate with the perceived offense.
Here’s some perspective: The number three cause of death in the United States is medical error. Do doctors get vilified like movers? No. Some doctor gives you the wrong med, or the wrong dose, or the wrong diagnosis, and before you know it, you’re lying in a coroner’s fridge wearing a toe tag. This happens to hundreds of thousands of people every year, but people still go around in hushed tones deferring to “the Doctor.” Nobody goes on the internet to spew bile about how Dr. X killed his wife.
And another thing, while I’m at it: The moving industry is often portrayed as this monolithic leviathan conspiring to separate as much money from its customers as it can grab. This monolith is actually thousands of individual enterprises, each with its own ideas about ethics and service. In truth, the moving industry is less like a leviathan and more like the Lebanese parliament. Each faction is vainly striving to achieve hegemony over its neighbors in an endless sequence of shifting alliances, treachery, and occasional benevolence.
Up until the Great Depression, the trucking industry was unregulated. Anyone owning a truck could carry any product anywhere for whatever price he could negotiate. As the depression deepened, the major players in trucking petitioned the government for help. In 1935, Congress regulated all interstate motor transportation, setting up a centralized schedule of fees and essentially closing the industry to new entrants. For the next forty-five years, interstate trucking rates were contrived by Byzantine formulas cooked up in the smoke-filled back rooms of trucking-industry trade associations.