Underground Moving

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We encouraged our customers to help out with the labor too. If they were weak and clumsy, it made them appreciate us more (and was probably good for them) and if they were strong, it made the work go more quickly. Sure, that lowered the bill . . . but it let us feel less like hired help and more like friends.

GETTING BIG:

Student Movers began as a two-man, one-truck, part-time operation. By spring it had become a big business employing several vans, a number of our friends and most of our time. Our reputation had spread through advertising and word-of-mouth, and we had tapped a vast market in the city and suburbs for a reliable but cheap moving company. When the schools let out and summer subletting began, we were inundated by pleas for our services.

It's hard to turn down jobs even when you're booked solid, so we recruited every bus and truck in our neighborhood to take care of our excess business. We worked on a commission basis, doing the advertising and phone work and taking two dollars an hour off the wages for our time. It wasn't worth it.

Student Movers was our business, and the people we hired simply didn't feel the sense of responsibility that we did. They would miss appointments, confuse schedules, overcharge. We'd get frantic phone calls at all hours: "Where's your truck? I've got to move right now," and it would turn out that the driver we'd commissioned had forgotten, broken down, gone to see his girlfriend, gotten drunk or (this actually happened) taken off for California. Which meant that we'd have to juggle schedules, maybe rent a truck and do the job ourselves . . . as we should have done in the first place.

Another type of commission work turned out better for us perhaps because—for it—we hired only our friends, rather than any stranger who happened to own a truck. We advertised "experienced workers to help you move," and found that, miraculously, people were willing to pay $5 an hour just for labor, no van. These were folks who needed help loading or unloading a U-Haul and people who were moving from one apartment to another within a single building. Once again our commission was small—$1 an hour—but we helped quite a few of our friends earn some extra bread. One truckless pal kept running this ad long after Student Movers shut down, and made several hundred dollars out of sheer bravado. If you can't afford a van right now, you might try hiring yourself out as labor in this way.

During spring vacation and semester breaks we used our overworked bus to run groups of students to the New York airports at $4 a head. A comparable cab trip costs $13 but by packing in ten people, we earned $40 for two hours' work. Since we weren't licensed to carry passengers for profit, this too was illegal. So . . . we removed the signs from our bus, took payment before we left and instructed our cargo to insist they were just friends being done a favor in case we got hassled by airport cops. We never got hassled but the whole thing involved tight scheduling, extra advertising and careful coordination of meeting times and places. Big money, big headaches.

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MOVING TO A SMALL TOWN'

Wanda Urbanska

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