These are pictures of a customer’s storage bins. The customer will remain nameless, but I can say they are a major medical practice! They directed our Moving Company to simply deposit these boxes and miscellaneous equipment in their bins. Some questions come to mind:
1) Are these boxes full of archived records that might need to be located at some time?
2) How do they expect to find anything?
3) Might there be a better way to organize these Storage Bins?
P-O-D-S are a very mixed bag. These are steel boxes, and there are wood versions, which are dropped off at your client’s home, and then the client gets them loaded somehow, and the PODS company comes back and picks them up and delivers them to the destination.
My experience with PODS is they only pay off for the customer IF THE CUSTOMER IS DOING THE LOADING AND LOADING THEMSELVES! If you were going to put some boxes and garage items and wooden chairs in a pod, and ship it somewhere or store it—Fine. But when you try to plan a major move, here are the problems:
1) There is no effective insurance {PODS won’t pay for “normal breakage, and the Mover won’t be responsible for items after they are loaded into a POD.}
2) There are very limited ways to tie-down the furniture {No slats and certainly no “E-Track”}
3) There are no decent pads to protect the furniture
4) The PODS are irregular sizes and the PODS incoming sales people frequently underestimate how many you need and then you need to call and order additonal PODS, and get an upcharge once you are already committed. What looked like a good deal renting two PODS, may no longer look so cheap if have to rent four PODS!
PODS and wood crates can help with “sideline storage,” but they are not effective for moving a high-value, high-volume house.
As a Moving Company, we have been called out to unload PODS which someone else unloaded, and when we opened the doors, the furniture was laying broken in a heap in the middle of the POD.
Even if we made the customer sign a waiver, before loading the PODS, we do not want to be associated with unhappy customers. So we could not take on the job of Loading the PODS in the situation of a high-value, high volume load.
But PODS are effective with smaller, lower volume loads. And we don’t have a problem with unloading PODS because the customer then doesn’t think us responsible or hold us responsible for damage. We have a customer who works for Coca-Cola and moves around the country, and uses a single POD each time. She has it loaded “to the gills” and then leaves whatever doesn’t fit. If you can fill the POD to the brim, then you can often get away with not tying down the load. But on a big load which requires three and one-half PODS, what do you do about the last POD which is only half full? You don’t want the customer at destination to open it up and find everything in a heap!
McGregor Moving's Insider's Guide on Moving 