Thread: PODS v U-PACK
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Old 09-02-2015, 10:13 PM
CaliforniaGirl CaliforniaGirl is offline
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Don't mean to hijack this thread, but here's a little U-Pack trivia: In 1994 my mother retired and was moving from Los Angeles to northern NV. I was a moving company exec (international Government moves) and my husband was a VP at ABF, a nationwide motor freight carrier. Even with my major industry "connections" her move was going to be quite expensive. My husband suggested that I have my company request from his company a spec rate for general cargo and pay only for the space used, which we could do legally as long as we declared it as "freight all kinds" and not household/personal effects, which had a much higher tariff rate. So that's what we did. A crew from my company loaded it and I hired a local crew out of Reno to unload it, and my mother's move ended up costing around 15% of what it would have cost for a normal move. Since ABF actually made money on this deal, he suggested to his company that they test-market this idea as a way to make money repositioning trailers that would have otherwise been moving empty. The test marketing was successful, and ABF U-Pack was born.
If you ever watched Extreme Makeover - Home Edition, you would have seen the U-Pack equipment show up at the end with the homeowner's personal effects that had been removed before demolition.