Tetris-masters and the Art of Moving
Many people can’t really understand why we refer to moving as a skilled trade, after all we are just picking stuff up and putting things down. The art of moving is the ability to take an entire home of furniture, odds and suds of all shapes and sizes and condense them into a solid block of furniture. When this is done correctly, the load is so tight that you can not get your hand in between the articles. It's exactly like a Tetris game or a giant jigsaw puzzle. You are working with a confined and defined space and you must fit all the odd shapes and sizes into that space. All the china and lose goods must be packed in boxes in the exact same way, a puzzle inside a puzzle all wrapped in a riddle called Moving.
This Zen like Tetris skill allows for both the highest payload on the truck as well as the safest way to transport goods. As this solid block of household goods does not move when the truck corners or goes over rough terrain. Now Couple that with the heat, the cold, the rain, the snow and physically handling of tens of thousands of pounds a day; Compounded with the rules regulations and skill involved in driving an eighteen-wheeler in a residential area, pressured by the Uber mentality of today's customers and you have an idea of what a professional Tetris-master/ Mover is made of.
The “capacity issues” in the moving industry have nothing to do with trucks. Let me be clear here there is not a truck or container shortage there is a skilled labour shortage. A Tetris-master shortage.
In our industry it is clear when an unsupervised summer crew has loaded a container as soon as the door is opened at destination. The goods have fallen over, heavy items are on light items and the goods are damaged. Not because the container fell off the truck but because the crew that loaded it where not Tetris- masters, they did not know how to properly build a load.
The driver is the skilled Tetris master he/she sends the crew into the home with requests for specific item, as the load is built, from heavy items on the bottom, to fragile items, to lighter items on the top. Every inch is used as they build each section or tier, assembling a twenty thousand lb jigsaw puzzle. Maximizing every inch of space and loading to ensure there is no movement of the goods as the truck or container moves. The capacity issues come from the decreasing number of Tetris- masters, not lack of equipment but lack of skilled labour.
What’s the answer? Long term training, no two homes are the same and the only way to become a Tetris-master is through practise. So being compensated properly over a long period of time is critical. Not so long ago a household goods driver (Tetris- master) made an above average wage in the trucking industry, now they are on par with freight drivers. Why would anyone hand load thousands of lbs of goods, in all sorts of nasty weather and utilizing their Tetris skills while dealing with stressed out Uber minded customers, when they could back up to a dock and drive away for the same money?
Take heed the definition of relocation is “to move” and like anything the skilled labour in the field, not management are the cornerstones to the entire customer experience. You can view all the glossy presentations in the world regarding reporting and management but the one questions that must be addressed on any relocation RFP is “What does your organization do to mitigate the capacity issues in the Household goods moving industry?” "Where do you find your economies on the relocation process and how do those economies directly affect the customer experience"? (Be aware that volume does not solve a capacity issue, think about that)
Cost containment is great but not on everything, would you buy the cheapest parachute you could find or the cheapest arm rest? The moving portion is a long-term fix that needs long term attention. The key to the entire relocation industry, no matter how anyone may try to trivialize this is by attracting and training skilled labour and that only happens through compensation (trust me on this). There lies the puzzle that we will have to work out in the very near future, where do you want to spend your money? We may need an out of the box corporate Tetris-master to solve this.