Let’s say there is a mass migration of people from the bleak, crumbling concrete of Newark, New Jersey, to the palm tree paradise of La Jolla, California. Every day, 100 people rent U-Haul trucks in Newark, drive cross-country, and after unloading, drop their trucks off at a U-Haul in La Jolla. In this scenario, hardly anyone is renting a truck in La Jolla for a one-way trip to Newark. It wouldn’t take long for there to be thousands of U-Haul trucks parked in lots in La Jolla and none anywhere near Newark.
It is a conundrum that provides the basis for a new game I’ve devised, one suitable for playing with your COVID-19 bubble buddies. All you need are some scraps of paper, each marked with the name of a different city, and a connection to U-Haul’s electronic reservation system.
U-Haul’s strategy for keeping its vast inventory of trucks spread around the country, available whether you want to go from Detroit, Michigan, to Detroit, Texas, or from Wilmington, Delaware, to Wilmington, North Carolina, is simple, though executed with sophistication. If there are too many people moving to a given area, U-Haul jacks up the price. If not enough people are heading in the opposite direction, it encourages do-it-yourself movers by slashing the rental fee.
The pricing is based on minute-to-minute data on where its trucks are and where they’re headed. U-Haul ultimately gathers this data into an annual “Migration Trends” report. The report is informative, but since it’s an annual exercise, the data are relatively stale by the time they’re released. The 2019 report, for example, came out two months before major cities were roiled first by COVID-19 and then by widespread rioting.
More interesting is the real-time data that U-Haul (inadvertently) makes available. The information is found in the online pricing of trucks based on their points of origin and destinations.
Here’s how different the daily pricing data is from the annual report. The Migration Trends released in January lists Manhattan ninth among top growing cities in the country. That was before the recent escape from New York began. To maintain inventory in New York these days, U-Haul is charging people roughly twice as much to take a truck out of the Big Apple as it is to bring one in. For example, if you need a big 26-foot box-truck to move your stuff from Manhattan to West Palm Beach, Florida, it will cost you (as of this writing) $3,892. Go from West Palm to the city that never sleeps, and it will only cost you $2,115.
And that overstates the current appeal of Gotham. Brooklyn to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, (all figures are for the big 26-foot rig) will set you back $2,603. Chapel Hill to Brooklyn, by contrast, is $492. It is an unambiguous measure of the current attractiveness of living in Brooklyn that moving there costs less than one-fifth of what you’re charged just to get the hell out.
Which brings us to the game: Each player picks two scraps of paper, each of which has the name of a city. Players guess which direction between their two cities is cheaper and what fraction (in eighths) of the more expensive destination that cost is.
Let’s say I put my hand in the hat and picked Philadelphia and San Diego. I guess Philly is the cheaper endpoint and surmise that it costs about half the freight of going the other way. A quick check of pricing on U-Haul’s website would show I won the round. Make it a drinking game (unless you have any driving to do), or make it a betting game.
Before you start betting, it’s worth becoming familiar with the magnitude of the current desperation migration. Here are a couple of examples that illustrate, in U-Haul dollars, the panicked flight from certain cities. If you want to move from Los Angeles to Phoenix, U-Haul charges $1,978. Go from Phoenix to LA, by contrast, and all you’ll need is $186.
Or take poor, hapless Portland, Oregon. A truck to take you away from there to the calmer precincts of Boise will set you back $1,242.
Boise to Portland? $91. Anyone? Anyone?
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
