A Tale of Two Victoria Moving Companies

Moving within or from: Victoria, Saanich, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, Langford, Colwood, Sooke, Central Saanich, North Saanich, Sidney, Metchosin, Highlands, or View Royal

A comparison of two Victoria area movers, highlighting one customer’s experiences to help you make the best choice for your next move.

Before I tell you about the best mover I have ever worked with (among six in the past 30+ years) I want to tell you about another moving company. This Victoria based moving company is not getting an unflattering review because of poor service, but because of … well, let me start at the beginning.

Everything went very well with Sweenie Moving … good reviews, prompt courteous service, in-home estimate … until I got the bill.

Rewind 17 years …

We had a less than favourable experience when we moved from Ontario to British Columbia 17 years ago. I knew that most of the bill would be based on weight, so we weighed each box using the bathroom scale, estimated the weight of the bigger/heavier items and the total came to 3,000 LBS. We were billed for 3,600 LBS. I was a little shocked but there was nothing to be done about it.

Fast forward 17 years to the summer of 2025 …

I didn’t want another unpleasant surprise, so again we weighed each box (no furniture) and the total was 1,700 LBS – which was what the salesperson had estimated and then bumped up the estimate to an even 2,000 LBS.

The truck picked up our stuff, we flew from the west coast to the east coast, and our shipment was about 3 weeks behind us. Soon after arriving I contacted the salesperson and asked for the invoice and the weight number. The bill was much higher than expected because the billed weight was a little over 2,100 LBS. At almost $4 per lb this was a significant increase in the expected bill.

I emailed back and expressed my shock; I told him that I would have an industrial weigh scale along with a CPA to witness the weighing of the boxes as they came off the truck and send the final weight to him so the bill could be adjusted. He informed me that northAmerican Van Lines would not accept that weight number, but if I really wanted to verify the weight I could pay for a “re-weigh” at a CAT scale which, it turned out, would cost $350. In short, I would have to pay an agent of NAVL on the east coast $350 to prove that the NAVL agent on the west coast overbilled me. I agreed, thinking that Sweenie Moving, after realizing that a mistake was made, would reimburse me for the fee; that did not happen. TIP: Have reimbursement agreed upon beforehand.

After talking to my brother who had worked for a moving company many years ago, I learned that I could have Sweenie Moving send the weigh scale tickets to me. The two tickets, before the loading and after the loading, were on a one-page PDF. At first glance all seemed in order; both tickets were in KGS, the difference was converted to LBS using a factor of 2.205. A while later I took a closer look. The weigh scale ticket for the loaded truck was fine: name and address of the weigh scale owner, customer name, date in, time in, weight per axle of the truck, etc. The ticket for the empty truck, however, did not have a date in or time in; instead there was a ticket number. I contacted the company provided on the ticket and asked for their help: would it be possible for them to look up the ticket and confirm that it was generated on the morning of the move. They very kindly replied to me (via email) and told me that they have no record with that number. My bill was based, in part, on a weigh scale ticket that did not exist.

After learning that our shipment was ready to be delivered to our home, I arranged for the reweigh at the nearest CAT scale. I was not given copies of the weigh scale tickets which I requested at the time but was able to take pictures. The ‘heavy’ ticket was in KGS and the ‘light’ ticket in LBS. When I multiplied the heavy weight by 2.205 and subtracted the light weight the result was 1,700 LBS. I sent this information to Sweenie Moving and asked again for a refund. Sweenie Moving replied with copies of the two tickets, both in LBS, and a resulting weight of 1,940 LBS. The weight in KGS was converted to LBS at about 2.251 LBS per KG instead of 2.205 (this represents an extra charge of 5%). This conversion took place at the CAT scale; the driver received the scale ticket in the default KGS and then when the light truck was weighed, requested and received the same weight ticket converted to LBS at the higher rate by the CAT system.

I recreated the bill in Excel; most of the line item amounts depended on the weight and were expressed as $x.yz per CWT (100 LBS). I put the lower weight in the spreadsheet and contacted Sweenie Moving with the revised bill line items and total and requested a refund of the difference but excluded the re-weigh fee. I did not get a reply within a couple of days so I emailed again but included the re-weigh fee. The reply I received did not commit to a refund of the overbilling and made it clear that I would not be receiving a refund of the re-weigh fee. (At the end, Sweenie Moving did refund half of the re-weigh fee, and since there was not an agreement on a refund should the re-weigh prove an over-billing, I accepted the half refund as fair.)

I registered a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) summarizing the above. The reply from Sweenie Moving included the following excerpts: “The second scaled weight was within 200 lbs of the original, which is well within the industry-accepted variance … A variance of a few hundred pounds between weigh-ins is not unusual … all procedures were followed in accordance with standard industry practices … We would like to emphasize that the original scale ticket on file is valid and corresponds to the exact truck that transported [my] shipment…“

The credit amount was just the ‘Transportation’ line item and completely disregarded the other line items which also depend on the weight, and ignored the GST/HST on the total.

The above statement(s) from Sweenie Moving states very clearly that a difference of “a few hundred LBS” is “within the industry-accepted variance” and could be due to, among other factors, different calibration of the weigh scales being used before and after a load is picked up. TIP: Make sure to use the same weigh scale for both weigh-ins.

Sweenie Moving referred to ‘the original scale ticket’ as being valid, and I agree that the ‘heavy’ weight was valid but Sweenie Moving made no mention of the ‘light’ weight ticket which the scale owner could not find in their records, and which formed the basis for the billing based on a calculated weight of 2,116 lbs.

This is not a rant against Sweenie Moving; all of the above statements are supported by emails and PDFs from Sweenie Moving personnel and communications within the BBB platform.

The Best Moving Company

Now that the unpleasant business is out of the way …

The best moving company I have worked with treated us right from day one. The driver and helper showed up on time and was professional and courteous the whole move. Instead of sending three guys for the move, they sent just two because it saved me some money. The driver went over the invoice line by line to ensure that I agreed with everything that I was being billed for before payment. The rates were on the low end compared to other movers.

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