I was seventeen the first time somebody screamed at me about a sofa.

Fifth-floor walk-up, prewar building, and a doorway built in an era when people simply owned less. The customer had a brand-new designer sofa and it was not going through that door. Not at any angle, not with the door off its hinges, not with four of us and every trick we had. She was irate. She was also entitled to be, nobody had told her this was a possibility. We ended up bringing in a couch doctor to take the thing apart and rebuild it inside her living room.

The Man Who Taught Me the Trade

My mother’s husband at the time owned the moving company. He was, and I say this with a strange kind of affection, a scumbag. But he was a professional scumbag. The man could wrap a dresser like he was dressing a wound. Blankets pulled tight, corners doubled, tape laid down in a way that didn’t scar the finish when you pulled it off six hundred miles later. He taught me that furniture never leaves the house exposed. Never. Not for ten feet, not for the length of a driveway, not because it’s raining and everyone’s tired.

He also used to make me unwrap items and pack them again if he decided I hadn’t done it well enough. I believed for years that this was mentorship. It wasn’t. It was billable time. He ran a local moving company, what we call in this industry a chop shop, and the customer always, always paid more than they were told they would. The repetition made me a master packer anyway, which is a strange thing to be grateful for.

The lesson underneath it was the one that stuck, though he taught it to me backwards. He explained that nobody would ever book with us if we told them the truth: that a fourth or fifth-floor walk-up was going to take seven hours, not the three we quoted. So we didn’t tell them. I learned that lesson the wrong way, from the wrong man, and I have spent twenty years making sure it never happens to a customer of mine.

The Crew

The crew he hired were lunatics. Genuinely. Some of the most unhinged human beings I have ever shared a truck cab with, most of them gone now. And they were magnificent. They packed boxes that didn’t crush under three hundred pounds of stacked weight. They knew what a mirror carton was for, and more than that, they knew how to cut one open, or a wardrobe box, and build a soft crate around a marble top or some irreplaceable piece of glass furniture that had no business surviving a highway. They could build a strap out of nothing but tape and lower a piece down through a second-floor window when the staircase said no. They knew that the customer standing in the doorway watching them had spent the last three weeks not sleeping.

They were real professionals as movers and real degenerates as men, and both of those things were true at the same time, all day, every day. I still remember one of them having a seizure on a job, in front of the customer. It was one of the worst mornings of my young life, and I learned more that day than in the six months around it.

That’s where I learned the business. Not in an office. On a staircase, with my hands.

Building Safeway Moving

I’ve spent the twenty-plus years since then working for seven different moving companies before I built my own. Everything Safeway Moving does today, the training, the barcode tracking, the fact that we own our trucks and perform our own deliveries, comes from what I saw missing at every stop along the way.

That experience is also why I care so much about helping people understand who they’re actually hiring. Not every mover is built the same way, and knowing the difference before you book can save you a terrible week. If you want to see how we think about it, I wrote up the three leagues of moving companies and where most movers actually fall. And if you’re planning a move yourself, you can see how we approach it as an interstate moving company serving all 48 states.