New and Improved SSMovers.com Website

Now offering portable storage solutions, Starving Students has made some improvements to the design and content of their website: http://www.ssmovers.com to reflect the new product offering.

Marketing Director, Matthew Wishingrad comments, "We hope that our valued customers will find our new Web site more informative and easier to navigate. On the user-end, there is more content regarding our portable storage benefits and the reasons why our customers can save time by coordinating storage and moving services through one company. We've added new features such as the updated 'Moving Advice' section with money-saving tips in response to the current economic climate. Starving Students understands the difficulty of hiring movers when one is faced with a short-sale or foreclosure. We wish to relay the feeling that Starving Students supports our valued customers even through the tough times.”

Visitors to SSMovers.com, will find expanded location-centric information and reviews from other customers on their moving experiences. Reserving a moving day is now even easier with a popup-calendar feature and online moving specialists available through email and instant messenger seven days a week. Starving Students has very accommodating hours of operation as well. They are open from Monday through Friday from 5AM PST until 7PM PST, Saturday from 6AM PST until 6PM PST, and Sunday from 7:30AM PST until 3:30PM PST.

Starving Students is one of the leading moving companies in the nation and has been offering moving services since their inception in 1973.

Starving Students Inc. Moving Company Management Promotion

Starving Students, one of California and Nevada’s most esteemed moving companies announced today the promotion of two key players in the organization: Sara Wicks and Jason Newsome.


Sara Wicks, a veteran member of the management team at Starving Students, formerly Regional Director of the Northern California and Washington State districts, is now overseeing all long distance moves across the country.  In the past, Sara Wicks has been applauded for her strong female representation in what most would consider a man’s world – the moving industry.  When asked to comment on her recent promotion, Sara Wicks stated “This is a great opportunity to optimize our long distance moving services and the customer experience through faster relocation times, improved customer service, and streamlined operations.  We’ve come a long way with 35 locations in ten states, moving thousands of customers every month, but we’re always looking for new ways to improve our services. ” 


Jason Newsome, now the Regional Director for the Southern California region, is expected to have a huge impact on one of the busiest regions under the Starving Students umbrella including the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Monica, and Riverside.  Mr. Newsome’s background with ten years of military service highlights the Starving Students commitment to supporting the contribution of America’s military personnel. Mr. Newsome stated, “I hope to really transform the way that we respond to short notice moving reservations by expanding our fleet for a faster response and greater coverage.  With the rise in the short sale market, our customers need a mover that they can depend on with less lead time between the reservation and moving day.  We aim to continue our focus on being that dependable mover.”


Starving Students congratulates Sara Wicks and Jason Newsome on their respective successes and the future positive impact their efforts will have on our valued customers.



Mention Code "20 Off" when you reserve your moving day to receive 20 dollars off of your moving bill.

Press Release - Women Comprise 20% of Starving Students Movers Field Management

Women Comprise 20% of Starving Students Movers Field Management

Los Angeles & Tacoma, July 14, 2006: Women continue to make great strides in blue-collar industries. Starving Students, the nation’s leading local mover, boasts 20% of its field management is comprised of women. At Starving Students, the women field managers and directors are growing in numbers and, more often than not, outperform their male peers. Two women managers Kim Nicholl and Sara Wicks credit their success in this male-dominated blue-collar industry, to three qualities: determination, drive to outperform, and detail-orientation.

Kim Nicholl, one of five regional directors for Starving Students, sets high expectations for herself, and this, she says, is how she consistently stays ahead of her all-male peers. She is often the number one regional director at Starving Students, maintaining high customer satisfaction ratings, high move completions, and low workers compensation claims. Kim Nicholl is the competition to beat.

Starving Students’ Tacoma, Washington office is making great progress. It has been open less than a year, and under branch manager Sara Wick’s management, it has risen into the top 5 branches in the country. That’s because Sara makes sure her moving crews understand the rationale behind certain rules and procedures. By communicating in depth, Sara ensures her team stays focused, follows protocol, and delights customers.

The women at Starving Students are changing attitudes of everyone they meet. The results speak for themselves. The sole woman regional director out of five regional directors has spent most of her five years at Starving Students as the number one regional director. Also there are 8 women branch managers out of 38 branch managers, and four of the top eight branch managers are women. These women on the move continue to exceed expectations and goals, leading to the conclusion that perhaps the best man for the job is a woman!

For more information, please contact Megan Long at (800) 441-6683 or mlong@ssmovers.com.

Press Release - Starving Students CEO Bear Barnes Credits Company Success to Embracing Technology

Starving Students CEO Bear Barnes Credits Company Success to Embracing Technology

Los Angeles, June 13, 2007: Starving Students’ CEO Bear Barnes brought business leaders and budding entrepreneurs downtown to the Los Angeles Athletic Club, as a guest speaker at SCORE’s Business Legends Speaker Series on June 6. Bear shared the stage with Steven Riboli of the San Antonio Winery and together they shared the long histories of their L.A.-based companies. Bear also discussed how Starving Students has applied innovative technology to the traditional moving industry resulting in increased productivity and profit.

Starving Students has grown from two college students delivering flea market purchases in 1973 to a nationwide moving company that has completed 900,000 moves and counting. Today Starving Students operates 36 branches in nine states and moves over 1,000 families each week.

For 30 years Starving Students corporate office in Los Angeles managed its growing network of remote locations with phones and faxes. In 2004, the company installed terminal servers in each branch and wrote software to guide branch managers through the details of their day. The transition was difficult, and it required teaching new skills to company veterans, but the results have been remarkable. Communication and productivity have increased dramatically, and customers, movers and the company have all benefited.

Concurrently Starving Students saw the potential for what technology could do for its fleet of 300 trucks. The company installed GPS units in each of its trucks, enabling the company to keep track of where its teams and trucks were at any given time. Because the company charges by the hour, being able to bill accurately to the minute, and back up the billing with data, made a huge difference in customer satisfaction and increased the company’s bottom line.

Today Starving Students is working on eliminating the flow of paper from its branches to its corporate office via imaging software. Rather than receive 36 overnight packages stuffed with paperwork each week, managers now scan their paperwork into the system. The computer reads the document and attaches its image to the appropriate order. Upon completion, Starving Students looks forward to a roomier corporate office without filing cabinets.

By applying existing technology and forward management thinking, Starving Students is an example of how a company can generate above-market profits in a mature industry.


For more information about Starving Students, please contact Megan Long at (800) 506-0366 extension 255.

UCLA Undergrad Founded Starving Students, California’s Largest Local Moving Company

UCLA Undergrad Founded Starving Students, California’s Largest Local Moving Company

UCLA undergrad Ethan Margalith ’79 had many things on his mind - studying for midterms, writing papers, and of course, running his own business. What he didn’t know then was that his start-up moving company Starving Students, which he began as a way to pay for school, would grow into the nation’s leading local moving company.

Ethan and his friend Darryl Marshak could not find part-time jobs so to earn extra cash they started buying and selling antiques and collectibles at swap meets. A friend offered them a WWII weapons carrier truck on the condition that they could dig it out of a mudslide. It was challenging but they did it. Seeing the truck, swap meet customers would approach them about delivering their purchases home.

It turns out they weren’t making any money selling the antiques. One night when the rent was due, out of frustration, they wrote “Starving” on the truck in front of the words “Students for Hire.” The next day the phone rang off the hook with customers looking to hire “Starving Students.” Six months down the line, Starving Students had an office next to the Château Marmont in Hollywood and employed 30 students.

By the end of his senior year at UCLA, the young entrepreneur had opened six locations throughout Southern California to meet the growing demand for Starving Students movers.

In 1979, Ethan graduated from UCLA with a degree in philosophy and went on to earn a law degree at night from Loyola University. The opportunity with Starving Students was too good to pass up, so Ethan decided against a career in law to continue on the entrepreneurial path.

Today, 34 years after he first painted the word “Starving” on a truck, Ethan remains involved as Founder of the company, although it is run by CEO Bear Barnes, a graduate of the UCLA MBA program. Today Starving Students is the largest local mover in California and Nevada, moving over a 1,000 families each week, from its humble beginnings at UCLA. Starving Students now operates 36 locations in 9 states and its heart-centered logo is widely recognized on the 300 trucks driving around America.

Starving Students Delivers 34,800 Pounds of Food for SOVA’s Biggest Food Drive of the Year

Starving Students Delivers 34,800 Pounds of Food for SOVA’s Biggest Food Drive of the Year

San Fernando Valley, October 18, 2006: Starving Students, the nation’s leading local mover, volunteered its movers and trucks for the SOVA Community Food & Resource Program’s High Holiday Food Drive. This is the organization’s biggest food drive of the year, and over four days Starving Students picked up 34,800 pounds of donated groceries from 19 Jewish temples.
Starving Students mover Evan Howard takes a deep breath before moving the mountain of brown bags donated by Temple Aliyah. Beginning October 3, six Starving Students movers and two trucks helped pick up and deliver donated groceries to the SOVA warehouse where they would be distributed to families in need. The movers traveled throughout Los Angeles County and San Fernando Valley and loaded more than 29 pallets of groceries into their trucks. The food was collected from the temples’ congregation in observance of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Mountains of brown paper bags filled with an assortment of foods met the Starving Students movers, who could not help but look astonished at the piles of grocery bags waiting for them at the various temples. Suddenly 26 foot moving trucks, that fit an entire family’s furnishings, became too small for the countless bags of food donations. The Starving Students movers loaded the groceries into 4 feet tall containers set on pallets in the trucks. Before half the day was over, the trucks were packed to the brim and had to return to the SOVA warehouse for drop off. “This morning we filled up nine huge containers and had to drop off the food and this was only after picking up from two temples!” said veteran driver Tobias Gallegos of the first day. Each pallet weighed an average 1,200 pounds. Back at the SOVA warehouse, a forklift moved the half ton pallets to where they would be sorted into categories ranging from baby foods to pastas, snacks, canned soups, juices, etc.

The High Holiday Food Drive is SOVA’s largest food drive of the year and will provide enough food for the pantry for six months, enough to feed families through spring of next year. Each month SOVA provides groceries to over 3,900 people. Fifty percent of the food SOVA distributes comes from their food drives including the High Holiday Food Drive.
Starving Students movers enter a grocery-filled room at Temple Judea. A month before each food drive, SOVA distributes flyers to local synagogues. The flyers announce the food drive, suggests a list of what to buy to donate, and when to return to the temples with their filled bags. For the High Holiday Food Drive, most of the temples staple the flyers onto brown grocery bags and place them on the congregation seats. The rabbis make an announcement on Rosh Hashanah to fill the bags and return with them full on Yom Kippur. After all the donations are collected, Starving Students picks them up and delivers them to the SOVA warehouse.


“Starving Students has been helping SOVA with our food drives for the past three years and every year I’m impressed with their speed and efficiency. Their contribution makes a big difference!” comments Maxine Meyer, Resource Development Specialist for SOVA.

A forklift carries the half-ton pallets of food from a Starving Students truck into the SOVA warehouse. SOVA, a nonsectarian program of the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, operates three food pantry and resource center facilities in the Beverly-Fairfax area, West Los Angeles, and San Fernando Valley. Each center offers free groceries and supportive services to people whose limited incomes make it difficult to provide adequate, healthy food for themselves and family members. Anyone in need is welcome at the SOVA site nearest them.

“This is a charitable act that requires heavy lifting, so we’re just the guys to do it,” says Bear Barnes, Starving Students’ CEO.

Starving Students is the nation’s leading local mover, taking care of more than 1,000 families each week. Starving Students has been in business since 1973 and today employs over 1,000 movers in 9 states doing local and long distance moves.

For more information about SOVA, please contact Maxine Meyer at (818) 988-7682.
For more information about Starving Students, please contact Megan Long at (800) 441-6683.

Press Release - Starving Students Helps in the Fight Against Cancer

Starving Students Helps in the Fight Against Cancer

Los Angeles, CA, August 1, 2006: Starving Students Inc., the nation’s leading local mover, helped aid the fight against cancer, volunteering its movers and services for the Concern Foundation’s 32nd Annual Block Party, a charity event which raised an estimated $1.8 million for cancer research in one night.

Starving Students volunteered its movers and trucks for four days to help the Concern Foundation set up and get ready for the block party themed “Great Outdoors Adventure: The Expedition to Conquer Cancer” held Saturday evening on July 15 at the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood. The greatly anticipated charity event sold out, and the 4,000 guests reveled in casino-style gaming, lively musical entertainment, California wine tasting, interactive “outdoor” activities, and live and silent auctions.

“The evening was a huge success,” says Steve Freed, Chairman of Concern Foundation, “and we couldn’t have done it without help from Starving Students. No event of this size or magnitude could be orchestrated by just a few people. We are extremely thankful to Starving Students for helping us execute this event.” The Concern Foundation is a nonprofit organization that has been raising funds for cancer research (prevention and treatment) since 1968.

“We aren’t research scientists, we carry heavy things for a living,” says Bear Barnes, CEO of Starving Students, “We’re grateful to the Concern Foundation for giving us a way to help in the effort to find a cure for cancer.” Starving Students also provided assistance for last year’s Block Party and plans to continue helping the Concern Foundation in their future endeavors.

Starving Students is the nation’s leading local mover and completes over 55,000 moves a year. It specializes in both local and long distance moves with a fleet of over 300 trucks. Starving Students has been in business for over 34 years and has 38 branches in 9 states.


For more information about the Concern Foundation, please visit http://www.concernfoundation.org/.
For more information about Starving Students, please contact Megan Long at (800) 441-6683.