I use U-haul all the time. Both for trucks and propane and I have never had a bad experience.
I must say, I never understand why people assume that local stores provide better experiences. If I went to a local store and had a bad experience, should I tell people never to go to local stores? I don't know, doesn't really make sense to me.
Every store is different whether it is owned by a big company or not. The employees in the store are the ones that provide the experience. People who work at U-haul or at U-small can provide equally good and bad experiences. To me any complaint against a U-haul should be against the specific site, not against all of them. Obviously based on other peoples experiences it does not always correlate.
I'm willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, dude. I run a small business myself, so I know how a minor misunderstanding can be construed as "dat bidness is teh suxxorz!" very quickly. But...did you read my story? Every single person I dealt with that day was incompetent at best, horribly rude and *****ey at worst. And when I dug around the interwebz and found the corporate contacts, they told me "there's nothing we can do, the regional office has jurisdiction here". So what I found with U-Haul is that they have a three-tiered system of plausible deniability set up. Corporate apparently has no control over the regional offices, who are, in my experience, total jagoffs. In turn, those regional offices have no control over the local franchises, which are often little more than dumpy little mechanic shops that picked up a U-Haul franchising deal to generate some extra cash.
So before you talk about how "a complaint against U-Haul should be against a specific site", why don't we check out the real issue, and that is that the corporate policy (as admitted to me by a higher-up in the corporate office) is to lie about reservations? Yes, the local Roanoke office was to blame for their particular rudeness, but the company as a whole is to blame for their awful policies of taking your credit card, charging you a deposit, promising you a truck, but not actually "reserving" anything...and then, when something goes wrong, they wave their hands in the air and say "hey, sorry, not our problem, the regional office has jurisdiction".
Not only that, but why don't you
type in "u-haul sucks" into google, and see just how isolated my experience is. Hell, just try complaints.com, where I posted my story, and see how many u-haul horror stories there are. This is not an isolated incident, this is indicative of company policies which encourage poor customer service and are completely counter to the idea of "reservation". I can't tell you how many stories I've read about, for instance, someone driving along and the axle falls off their U-Haul truck, and they end up sitting on the side of the road for 12 hours waiting for someone. It's a bad company, through and through. Yes, there may be some good apples in local franchises, but those guys don't do anything but give you the trucks. If, god forbid, you ever have to deal with customer support, or you ever have to reserve a truck, you'd better be prepared to get effed in the A.
