What a mess.

The largest specialty furniture group carrier in the USA abruptly closed its doors on Monday night, Sept 19th with no notice. This is a consortium of MGM Transport, Caldwell Truck and Foothills Transport Group.

As consumers, you won't see these trucks bringing your furniture, but they are the primarly hauler for most manufacturers to get pieces to the retail dealers. Rather than letting the manufacturers and dealers know a few days ahead of time they were shutting down they continued to pickup furniture right up to an including Monday the 19th. That means there is new furniture on the way to stores that is stuck in trailers at distribution centers with no viable plan to move it. They simply locked up the trucks and told everyone their job was over. Nice. I always love it when companies do that with no regard for their customers.

Bottom line...if you have an order in with a local dealer and its delayed, its probably because everyone in the industry is scrambling to find alternate carriers or else get the pieces out of these trailers. FTG was the 800 lb Gorilla so its going to take a few weeks to sort out, I'm sure.

I use Murrow's Transfer of Shelba Johnson as my carriers, so my flow to my store will not be interrupted, nor does this affect the various White Glove Delivery Services.