Movers, Packers Get Off-the-Job Training

STAFFORD, Va. —  The dishes in Sharon Humes’ china cabinet are meant to be chipped. Her white walls are destined for smudges; stains on her new wall-to-wall carpet are inevitable; and the dining-room table will surely get scratched.

Everything inside a house Humes helped design is meant to be damaged, all in the hope that employees of Hilldrup Moving and Storage will be more careful with other people’s stuff.

“Typically, movers were doing a lot of learning in the customer’s residence,” said Humes, who supervises training for the $30-million United Van Lines affiliate. “We’d rather correct mistakes here. Better our furniture than yours.”

The one-story house sits inside a converted warehouse at Hilldrup’s headquarters 30 miles south of Washington. It is complete down to mulched shrubbery by the front door and a closet full of miscellaneous junk in one bedroom.

The wreath of dried flowers on the front door poses a special challenge for packers, Humes said.

“We wanted to have the variety of obstacles you’d see in a normal residence,” she said.

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Amoving van is bolted to the floor nearby so trainees can practice intricate stacking and loading techniques during about 30 hours of classroom instruction.

Trainees must select the correct box, crate or wrapper for each item. Odd-size pictures and an antique plant stand require trainees to build a crate.

The house has gotten a workout from several groups of newly hired packers and movers since Hilldrup completed it in the fall.

There are already gouges in a door frame, most likely left by a double-door refrigerator, and dark marks on a few walls.

“I’ve got nice floors and nice carpet in there. I want them to feel the heat when they tear up some nice carpet,” Hilldrup President Charles McDaniel said.

Hilldrup is one of the nation’s largest regional movers, with about 400 employees and offices in several East Coast states. The company moved about 9,300 households in 1996, Humes said.

Some of the largest national van lines have similar hands-on training for their affiliates, said George Bennett, spokesman for the American Movers Conference, an Alexandria, Va.-based trade association. Hilldrup is apparently the first regional affiliate to build an entire house, he said.

“It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that this was what we should do,” McDaniel said. “It makes sense to give them a real-life experience to practice with.”

Many of the approximately 16 million Americans who relocate each year probably think the movers practiced on them.

Moving companies know that some breakage is inevitable, but firms have good business reasons to keep the damage to a minimum, Bennett said.

“It keeps the customers happy and coming back, or referring [the moving company] to others,” Bennett said. “The second part of it is claims. All companies want to hold down their claims costs.”

The industry paid $71 million in claims last year, according to American Movers Conference figures. The number has declined slightly in recent years, in part because of intensive training, Bennett said.

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Humes used to run the claims department for Hilldrup.

Many of the sad tales she heard in that job--broken clocks, lost hardware for cribs--are reflected in the furnishings for the model house.

“Grandfather clocks were a problem, so we have one of those,” she said.

She also suggested that the house have a nursery, because cribs and other children’s equipment are a regular trouble spot.

Martin Zepeda was a mover for nine years before joining Hilldrup four months ago. His training at the model house was nothing like the instruction he received elsewhere, Zepeda said.

“At my other job you showed up at the house and it was, ‘Here’s a box; here’s some paper. Pack the box,’ ” Zepeda said. “You’re really learning on people’s furniture. You’re bound to make a lot of mistakes.”