Accelerating can be hazardous… to furniture?

I was waiting at an intersection on my way home from work when I heard a loud crash. A pickup had accelerated hard when the light changed, then stopped dead in the road. The girl in the passenger seat climbed out of the truck, and ran behind the truck, out of sight. She came back carrying the footboard to a waterfall bed, antique by the looks of it. Then two guys were pumping gas at the nearby 7-11 left their car and ran out into the highway to help. They soon walked back with a huge entertainment center and muscled it up into the truck. I'm sure by this point my jaw had dropped. What else fell out of the back of the truck? Sure enough, the two guys walked back again, and came back with the headboard for the bed. There were no tiedowns for any of this, and the tailgate was down. What were they thinking? You can't just put stuff in the back of a truck and expect it to stay there. Lucky for them, the stuff just slid out and landed flat on the road, and it didn't look like anything got broken. It was, however, a highly entertaining example of how not to move furniture.