Family’s Brandon to Winnipeg moving day a near U-Can’t-Haul disaster By: Tyler Searle Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Aug. 19, 2022

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/08/2022 (762 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Moving day: boxes packed, kids accounted for and help on hand to load the truck.

Wait… where’s the truck?

Erin DeBooy and husband Jay Grobb were faced with a nightmare move on the Aug. 13 weekend when the U-Haul truck they’d reserved was unavailable at the last minute, leaving them scrambling to find a replacement.

“‘We’re screwed.’ That was the first thing I thought,” Grobb said. “We lined up our move pretty tight.… It’s pretty clear you’re supposed to be out of your house on the possession date once you sign that paperwork.”

Immediately, Grobb began calculating the lawyer fees and penalties the family would incur if they had to postpone the move.

His stomach dropped.

The Brandon couple put their home on the market in May, intending to relocate to Winnipeg to be closer to family.

By June, they’d found a buyer and planned to move on Aug. 14. They agreed to give up possession of their home the following day.

Grobb placed a reservation with U-Haul months in advance, ordering a 26-foot truck, the largest size in the fleet.

Days before they were set to leave town, a representative from U-Haul emailed to deliver some bad news: The style of truck he’d reserved would not be in Brandon that weekend, and he would instead need to pick one up from Dauphin or Winnipeg on Aug. 13.

At first, it was an inconvenience, but the situation quickly worsened.

“We made the arrangement to have our family pick up the truck in Winnipeg and drive it to Brandon,” Grobb said. “Then, the morning of (the move), we got another change email… we talked to (U-Haul), and they said there was no 26-foot trucks available in the province at all.”

“We were basically just told that we were (out of luck) at that point.”– Jay Grobb

A series of negotiations, dropped calls and moments of panic ensued as Grobb tried to find a rental vehicle capable of making the trip.

“I was the one sitting there like, ‘OK, do you have two 20-foot trucks?’ Do you have (other trucks)?” Grobb said. “There was nothing. We were basically just told that we were (out of luck) at that point.”

Eventually, thanks to another customer backing out on their reservation, a 26-foot truck became available in Winnipeg Beach. It tacked on a few hundred extra kilometres to the trip, but they were able to make their move.

Jeff Lockridge, public relations manager for U-Haul International, points the finger at Manitoba’s population trends as partially responsible for the scheduling issue.

“There is inventory to accommodate our Manitoba customers, but… there are often imbalances between the families coming into Manitoba versus those leaving,” he wrote in an email.

Between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, Manitoba saw a net loss of 12,360 people leaving the province to settle elsewhere in Canada. It was the highest interprovincial loss in more than 40 years, according to figures from Statistics Canada.

While Manitoba typically loses more people to other provinces than it gains, last year’s net loss was double the annual average over the previous decade.

U-Haul has 23,000 rental locations across Canada and the United States. During the busy summer moving season, most of its one-way fleet is on the road daily, Lockridge said.

The nature of one-way transportation means every U-Haul rental that leaves must be replaced by an incoming truck — if not, the rental inventory becomes imbalanced, and options become limited.

“That is the nature of migration trends,” Lockridge said. “We always try to accommodate a customer’s preferred pick-up location, but sometimes need to direct customers to the next closest location where the equipment is available at that time.”

The best way to avoid a stressful move is to schedule possession dates on weekdays and avoid moving at month’s end, said Rana Wilkinson, a realtor with Royal LePage Martin-Liberty Realty in Brandon.

Additionally, she recommends hiring professional movers, who she describes as “worth their weight in gold.”

Unfortunately, few local businesses in Manitoba can facilitate one-way moves, meaning families such as Grobb’s can be left at the mercy of large organizations, Wilkinson said.

Grobb agrees.

“I want to emphasize how much of a monopoly U-Haul has on self-service trucks outside of Winnipeg,” he said, adding that while there are some options, they are typically unavailable on the weekend and more expensive.

“(I’d like to see) anybody else in the market… a local Manitoba company that can deal with trucks moving between cities and isn’t booking them out to other provinces. I feel like there is a pretty big void there.”

tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca