#U-haul

As you might have noticed, or heard from us, rental agencies have been hoovering up new and used vehicles to offset the 2020 selloff that stemmed from everyone mysteriously canceling their travel plans that year. Returning to normal, which is something anyone who didn’t assume the world was ending could have predicted, has resulted in increased pricing for vehicles — regardless of whether you’re renting or buying.

Rental companies typically try to play the vehicle market like the rest of use stocks or (if you’re hip) crypto. Buy low, sell high. But 2021 has created a perfect storm of increased demand coming after a long stretch of nothing and an auto industry that doesn’t seem to be capable of building cars thanks to all sorts of component shortages. But it’s no sweat for the big rental agencies because they’re now able to charge just about whatever they want. They’re keeping vehicles in their fleets longer, making more money off them, and selling them back at elevated prices.

With car rentals crippled through 2020 as society collectively stopped traveling in response to the pandemic, businesses entered 2021 with the perfect excuse to charge exorbitant fees to lend out some of the cheapest vehicles on the market. Cities have it particularly bad as rental firms find themselves with a surplus of locals wanting to escape and not enough vehicles to serve them. Daily rates now surpass three figures in metropolitan areas and can balloon by hundreds more if a customer wants to return the vehicle out of state (depending on the agency).

However, Hawaii is where things start to get really weird. The islands are reportedly in such short supply of rental cars that tourists are borrowing U-Hauls, where the biggest concerns of mileage and finding a parking space pale in comparison to the upfront cost of something more typical of vacationing families.

Last week, I wrote about our dramas and dilemmas with U-Haul’s newest product/service, U-Box, which we decided employ for our move from Nova Scotia to Ontario.

I tweeted out the link and made sure to mention the U-Haul Customer Service Twitter account.

This is what happened.

Kleenex is to facial tissue as Google is to searching the web; as Coke is to any soft drink in Metro Atlanta; as Nintendo was to video gaming in the ’90s.

In that vein, U-Haul is the Kleenex of moving vans.

At the beginning of each month, you’re bound to see at least five orange-and-white U-Haul misery machines piloted by sweaty-faced individuals attempting to transport their belongings, which they’ve hoarded over the last X number of years, to their new abodes. Their faces tell the tale: Moving is horrible. Everything about it is a nightmare. And U-Haul is intrinsically part of that nightmare.

But U-Haul doesn’t do just moving vans, trucks, and trailers.

During our move from Nova Scotia, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, to Oshawa, Ontario, some thousand miles to the west, we decided to give U-Haul’s newest product a whirl. It’s called U-Box and it promises to alleviate the needless torture of long-distance moving.

Promises are made to be broken.