Can a moving company in New York post a perfect five-star average and still leave you guessing about the bill? On the evidence assembled here, yes, and that tension is the verdict for Movers Not Shakers. The crews come well rated across a large sample; the office side draws the recurring gripe. A customer who hires this Brooklyn outfit without locking the price in writing is walking into the one weakness its own reviews keep flagging.

Twenty years of moves across the East Coast

Movers Not Shakers has run since 2002 out of Brooklyn, covering the five boroughs and the broader East Coast corridor. The headline figure is more than 20,000 completed moves over two decades. Twenty thousand jobs is not a number a relocation company reaches by accident; it implies a settled operational routine and a crew that has loaded enough walk-ups to know what it is doing. Take the figure as self-reported, since no third party audits a mover's job count, but it is consistent with the volume of outside feedback below, so I will not quibble with it.

Services from residential relocations to piano moving

The range Movers Not Shakers advertises is broad and stays inside what a moving crew can plausibly deliver. Residential and commercial relocations both, split by distance into local, long-distance, and interstate. Same-day moves for people caught short; scheduled bookings for those planning weeks out. Packing and unpacking are offered as a paid service, so you can hand over the whole job or keep the boxing yourself and rent only the muscle. Storage fills the gap when a new place is not ready. Movers Not Shakers also takes the jobs many New York crews avoid: piano moving, last-minute bookings, and small single-item runs that barely fill a van.

That last cluster is the more telling part of the list. Pianos and one-item runs are low-margin, awkward work, and a firm that advertises them either has the equipment and patience for them or is padding the page. Given the move count, I lean toward the former, but the listing does not say what a piano move costs or what counts as last-minute, so the scope reads wider than it is priced.

Reusable bins and biodiesel fuel

The environmental angle is the genuine differentiator for Movers Not Shakers, and it lives in the logistics rather than on an about page. The company packs into reusable plastic bins instead of single-use cardboard, which cuts post-move waste and gives a steadier stack in transit. The trucks run on biodiesel. Neither choice lowers the cost of carrying a couch up three flights, and the listing is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. The bin system is the practical half of it: it spares the customer the chore of flattening and dumping a mountain of boxes afterward. The biodiesel is more of a brand statement, real but harder to feel as a buyer.

So the eco identity is substantive, not paint. It also will not save you a dollar, and it has no bearing on whether the invoice arrives clean. File it as a reason to prefer Movers Not Shakers between two otherwise equal quotes, not as a reason to skip due diligence on the quote itself.

Partnerships with property managers and real estate agents

Beyond walk-in jobs, Movers Not Shakers works the institutional side, with partnerships among real estate agents, property management firms, and residential buildings. Repeat work of that kind is more reliable evidence than a testimonial wall. Building managers stop referring movers who scratch lobby floors or run late, so a standing relationship with property managers functions as a quiet vote from people who watch the same crews come and go. Licensing and insurance are stated on the site, which is the floor any New York customer should demand before handing furniture to strangers on a stairwell, not a selling point.

Ratings split between perfect scores and billing complaints

The outside record is large and uneven, and the spread tells a better story than any single number. Trustpilot shows 386 reviews at a flat five stars, an unusually clean result for work that turns on weather, traffic, walk-ups, and tired people on a deadline. Yelp lists 312 reviews, a deep pool, though the headline rating there was not published at the time of writing. Birdeye carries 236 reviews at 4.3 stars, strong, and probably nearer the lived average across ordinary jobs than the perfect Trustpilot wall.

Then the scores cool. The Brooklyn listing on Angi sits at 3.9 out of 5, respectable and more mortal. A separate Angi entry for Raleigh, North Carolina shows 4.9, but that looks like a different operation and has no place in the New York read. A Reviews.io presence holds just two reviews averaging 3.0, too small to mean much alone, yet it points the same way as the Angi figure. A moveBuddha writeup pulls the threads together: praise for speed and careful handling, set against complaints about customer service and billing transparency.

The billing line is the one to sit with. When a company with thousands of logged moves draws repeat complaints not about broken furniture but about the invoice and the communication around it, the trouble has moved from the warehouse to the front desk. A perfect Trustpilot average and a grounded 3.9 on Angi can both be true of Movers Not Shakers at once if the loading crews are capable while the back-office paperwork sometimes stings. The 4.3 on Birdeye, drawn from 236 voices, is the figure I would trust as the working average. The 3.0 from two reviews tells you almost nothing on its own and is worth citing only because it leans in the same direction as Angi.

Checking the invoice before the truck leaves

The hands-on work looks strong and well tested across a genuinely large sample, and the reusable-bin system gives Movers Not Shakers a clearer profile than the generic New York mover. I would put it on a shortlist on that basis alone. But the billing thread does not dissolve under the five-star headline; it surfaces in the moveBuddha notes and lines up with the softer Angi and Reviews.io scores, and it lands on the part of a move customers feel most sharply, the moment the final number arrives. The honest response is mechanical, not a leap of faith: get the estimate in writing, ask exactly what triggers an extra charge, and confirm the final figure before the truck leaves the lot. Skip that, and you are absorbing a risk these reviews have already documented.

Missing price information on the listing

What the published listing leaves unanswered is the thing the complaints are about: it gives no price for a local move, no hourly rate, no flag-fall for the piano or single-item jobs, and no written account of how an estimate becomes a final invoice. The reputation question I can resolve from the numbers; the cost question I cannot, and Movers Not Shakers has chosen not to answer it in print.