Google is the worst
Tl;dr: Google has terrible customer service and you should never buy their phones.
Google has taken the dubious honor of being the worst company I've ever had the misfortune to have to deal with their customer service. They have unseated the previous reigning champion of Razer, who held the dishonor for a good nine years.
It all started with the battery in my Pixel 2 no longer holding a decent charge. Upon checking around to see about getting a replacement put in, I was informed that the screens are "paper thin" and that there was a good chance the screen would be broken upon removal. The companies involved, including the authorized Google repair company UBreakIFix, expect you to pay for their mistake if they break the screen, more than doubling the cost. With the screen, it was going to be about $180 (I assume before tax). While I've been very happy with my phone except for the battery life, putting out nearly $200 for a phone that's most likely going to need to be replaced in a year tops seemed a poor value. Due to my satisfaction with my Pixel 2, I leaned towards the Pixel 5 right away, but even after I looked at other phones, it seemed the best fit for my desires of excellent camera, water resistance, and battery life. I would have been satisfied with something like the 4a or 4a 5G if water resistance had been on either of them, but since it wasn't, the 5 it was.
I made my order and waited. It shipped via OnTrac on November 2nd, with an estimated delivery of November 4th-5th. At 8:15 pm on Wednesday, November 4th, I got an email that it had been delivered at 8:05 pm. I went out to get it and...nothing. I checked the neighbors in front of me, the most common recipient of misplaced packages. Nothing. Given the time, it didn't occur to me that OnTrac would have customer service open, but I did immediately contact Google's support chat. I was told my issue had to be escalated and I would receive an email from their product specialists in 1-2 business days.
The next day, Thursday, November 5th, I called OnTrac. In all of the mess that followed, I do have to give them credit for one thing-it is extremely easy to actually get to talk to a person that is located in the country (so no bad cross-ocean phone lines or language barriers interfering with communication). All you have to do is go through two short menus and punch in your tracking code and the times I was put in a queue, it was only for a couple of minutes. The first agent I spoke with said that he would page the driver and find out what had happened with the package, whether he had left it somewhere (and if so, where) or if he perhaps still had it on his truck. He promised to call back within 45 minutes whether he'd heard back or not. About 40 minutes later, he called. He said the driver still had the package and was going to be in the area by 5:30 pm and deliver it then. About 5:20 pm, I checked outside, and nothing. Since I hadn't waited fully until 5:30 pm to check and given that delivery estimates can be derailed by things such as traffic, I gave it another hour and checked again. Nothing. I called OnTrac again at 6:30 pm to try to find out what was happening. This agent told me that the driver did not have the package, that the 5:30 pm event was just supposed to be him attempted to locate the package at the area he delivered it to. I pointed out that was clearly futile twenty-one hours after delivery and asked to speak to someone at the local hub. He said that was not possible. I asked for a phone number. He said they had only an internal system at the hubs and had no direct phone lines. I asked to be transferred. He said their internal system did not do this. He said he would forward the information to the hub and if I hadn't gotten a call by ten or twelve the next day that I should call back.
I attempted to talk to Google about all of this. Once the chat personnel looked at my file, she said it had already been escalated to a product specialist and I would receive a reply by email and then she kicked me out of the chat. Meanwhile, I had received no emails from the product specialists, just an email from someone assuring me that I'd get an email from the product specialists. I replies to the email, explaining what I'd encountered with OnTrac, that the package was lost, that I'd been kicked out of customer service chat, and that all of this was not okay and that I needed a new phone sent to me the way any other major company would do. Six hours later, I received an email saying that my issue had been escalated to the product specialists and asking what OnTrac had told me. I sent another email with even more detailed descriptions of my every call with OnTrac from the day. I then got a reply that all my info had been forwarded to the higher end support team.
Friday, November 6th came. I had not received a call, so about 1:00 pm, I called OnTrac again. The agent I spoke to said that my file had notes indicating that someone from the Salt Lake hub had called me and left a message (I believe the name was Rhea). I had not received a call or any voice mails and I said as much. The agent said they would forward on my info again and I should receive a call shortly (I was told a time frame, but at this point I'd been getting put off for x amount of time so much, the specifics of each individual time are blurring together). I received no phone call during this time frame. I called back and said as much, and having had enough of this back and forth with nothing happening, I demanded to speak to a supervisor. I was handed over to Brett, who said he was going to page the Salt Lake hub again. I went ahead and gave him a second number to pass along as well just in case. I strongly suspected that they were not being truthful to me about having called, as the very first agent I spoke with had been able to get through to me just fine, but I wanted to cover my bases just in case Google's spam filtering had caught them. He told me to expect a call by 7:00 pm and if I hadn't gotten one, to call back and ask for him. I asked if he had an extension or direct line. He told me no. I asked if there was some sort of employee number I needed to be able to be connected back to him. He said no, he was the only Brett in the office and to just ask for him.
At some point in the afternoon while waiting for phone calls, I went ahead and tried the Google angle again, this time having them call me. I went round and round with an agent, who would not escalate me (in fact, initially told me there were no supervisors) and could not or would not help me. I pointed out that it had been nearly two full business days since I'd initiated contact with Google and that we were about to go into the weekend and I could not be waiting until Monday to even hope to get a response. Given the number of people at Google who would literally do nothing for me, I expect that their first tier of support is given no power to do anything but read scripts, but it's ridiculous that it's so difficult to get any sort of help even for such a basic thing. Adding to the frustration is that I got told by multiple people at Google that OnTrac had to contact them before they could do anything to help me and multiple people at OnTrac told me that Google as the shipper had to contact them for anything more to be done.
7:00 pm came with, naturally, no call. I called OnTrac back and asked to speak to Brett. I was on hold for a very long time (the irony did not escape me of how nice it would have been to have the new "Hold for Me" feature on the Pixel 5 here) and was finally told he wasn't available and she'd leave a message for him to call me back. I waited about 45 minutes, and when I got no call, I once again called OnTrac. After another very long hold, I was told that Brett was still available. When I was offered another supervisor, Genevieve, I wearily agreed. She once again reassured me they were going to get to the bottom of this and she was going to email/ping/page/whatever the Salt Lake hub again. I was told I should get a call by 8:45 pm and that if I didn't, she was going to be in the office until 10:00 pm.
A bit after 8:45 pm and of course, still no call. I called again, asking for Brett or Genevieve. This time, Brett was finally able to be found. We discussed the situation again, he said he'd page them again, and as we were talking, I got the notification of an incoming call. I wrapped up the call with Brett, took the new one, and lo and behold, it was Maria at the Salt Lake hub. Note that she was able to call me just fine, indicating the previous times I'd been told I'd been called could not have been true. We went over the situation again and she said something about having just found out about this because there was some system being upgraded and she'd only now gotten the emails about the mess. She said she was going to call the driver's manager and get to the bottom of this. She also gave me her phone number and extension, proving that I'd also been lied to about there being no way to call the Salt Lake hub. I had strongly suspected at the time that it was a lie, which is maddening. If it's policy, just say you it's company policy that you can't give it out. I get that low level customer service agents have weird limitations like that. Don't lie to me.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, I get yet another call (again showing that real calls get through just fine). This time it was Vanessa, the driver's manager. She had talked to him and...my package was sitting on his truck, heading back to Salt Lake. He'd marked it as delivered when he had done no such thing. He then spent days driving around with it floating around in his truck with no one but him aware of it instead of following whatever procedure should be taken at OnTrac for packages that couldn't be delivered. He didn't attempt to deliver it again either. I asked her why he'd marked it as delivered when he hadn't done it and she said she'd asked the same thing and he said he thought he was at the right place and then couldn't find it. My husband, with his long experience dealing with drivers doing this kind of crap in his employment at a different shipping company, was disgusted. "You never, ever mark a package as delivered until you have actually delivered it," he says. However, OnTrac does not deliver on the weekends. Because of the driver's failure to do any number of things right, I was going to have to wait until Monday to get my phone.
I passed along what info I had to Google, though I'd been told so many different stories at this point, I didn't know what was the reality of the situation. The driver doing one bad thing after another had a ring of truth to it, especially with how exasperated his manager sounded, but hey, the very first thing I'd been told was that it was on his truck only to be later told that wasn't true, so what did I know. Over the weekend, I got a couple more emails from the same person I'd corresponded with before assuring me that the team was waiting for a response from the shipper and that I'd hear back from them soon. I still had never received a response from anyone able to do anything.
Monday came and in the early afternoon, I tried to call Maria at the Salt Lake hub to ensure my package was going to be delivered today. No answer, so I left a message. I imagine that was the right choice, as at 3:13 pm, I got a call from her. The driver was trying to deliver my package but thought no one was home. I said we hadn't heard him and I'd be right out. I'm not sure he'd actually tried knocking (though to be fair, we probably wouldn't have heard), because he was just sitting there outside my gate. Finally, my package. Ironically, after all that and him almost leaving with my package again, he didn't even ask for the signature that was supposed to be required.
One would think that would be the end of the nightmare phone saga, but alas, it is not. I'd spent some of the weekend lurking at the GooglePixel subreddit and seen a number of other people having various issues with either their Pixel 5, Google's customer service, or both. Upon opening my phone, I immediately checked for the large screen gap a number of the phones have had. I was relieved to see it did not and looked fine all around, so I put a screen protector and case on it and started getting it set up. Then I started calling first my dad, then my mom, to see how it was working. Both of them were busy and couldn't talk except to say they couldn't talk, but the little I heard was not encouraging. I'm not exactly an audiophile, so the reports of bad sound really hadn't worried me, but what I'd heard on the phone was really, really bad. I did some more reading so that when my mom was finally free enough to speak, I knew to try holding the phone with my ear below the top edge instead of right at is as we've been trained to do with phones for longer than I've been alive. We talked for 45 minutes or despite my adjusting my ear to various spots on the surface of the phone, the sound was terrible. It was muffled while also having a weird, tinny kind of echo. Just awful. Given that the primary function of a phone is to be able to make calls to people and be able to communicate with them, I knew I couldn't live with this for the next three or four years.
Now, some people have had actual sound problems with their Pixel 5's and some just can't stand the way the under-display speaker sounds. Since I had no others to compare with the way some people did, I hadn't the slightest whether it was an actual problem or if it was just the fundamental design flaw of the upper speaker. I was done. I was not going to be keeping this phone that couldn't even make calls I could hear clearly. I really didn't want to pay the $35 restocking fee imposed by the Google Store, so I hopped in chat with customer service.
In retrospect, I obviously wasn't going to get help. These people specialize in customer disservice. But I thought, "Surely this isn't a big deal, just send me an RMA form with a tag on my account to not charge me the restocking fee!" So into chat I went and explained that since I'd had so much trouble with them and since I wasn't sure if it was a device issue or a design flaw, I wanted the restocking fee waived. I was told I'd get an email within ten business days responding to my request. Ten business days! Keep in mind that their return window is two weeks and it had been marked in the system as delivered on November 4th. I pointed all that out and that I didn't want to risk being told no return because I was outside the window. "We wouldn't do that since you contacted us today," she said. I might have been naive enough to get into chat to try to get the restocking fee removed, but I wasn't naive enough to believe that, especially with stories on Reddit of people receiving packages with phones missing and phones RMA'ed to be repaired "magically" disappearing with Google refusing to do anything about it. I asked for a supervisor and was told I could get a response from one in 1-2 business days. Yeah, I've heard that one before too.
And so I caved and used the automated system to generate an RMA label so I can get this phone gone and get (mostly) refunded and proceed to divest myself with as much to do with Google as possible. I have been on Google Fi for my cellular network for most of the year and was about to add another line. Won't be doing that now. Turns out US Mobile, who I had service from before, has some even better plans for me now, so I'm happily switching back and setting up the new line there as well. Eric will have to remain on Fi until we have the money to pay off the rest of his phone in a lump sum, but once that's taken care of, I'll be switching his service as well. I'd planned to get Google Fiber if they ever made it up here. Won't be now. I've encouraged people to get Pixels in the past, in fact having urged my mom to get a 4a just a couple of weeks ago. I will be directing people away from Google, and especially their physical phones, at every point possible from now on. This was a nightmare spanning days that should never have happened. When the phone was nowhere to be found, they should have acted like every other large corporation and issued a new phone shipment to me while they worked with OnTrac to locate the package or get reimbursed through whatever their insurance or contract is with them. Expecting me to do the legwork when I'm not the shipper and have no pull on OnTrac and I can't even trigger things like reimbursement from the insurance is ridiculous. Being told by both companies that they had to hear from the other one while apparently no one but me would actually talk to anyone is beyond ridiculous. I still to this point have not received any sort of contact from the higher end support team. Given their ubiquity across any number of industries and back end web stuff the user can't see, I won't suggest that others should avoid all Google products entirely. I would, however, encourage you to stay away from any of their physical products such as the Pixel, the Pixelbook, their smart speakers, Nest stuff, etc. Aside from their terrible customer service, I realized as I thought about my bad experience that their hardware has a very high failure rate from my own personal experience. In March of 2018, my dad got a Pixel 2XL from Verizon. It flat out didn't work and had to be replaced immediately (fortunately, that was done through Verizon, so was a quick and easy exchange). I got my Pixel 2 in April 2018 and in either June or July that summer, I got the infamous camera bug where the camera just stopped working with nothing fixing the issue. I got that replaced and even though it was very much under warranty and had been so new when the problem occurred, they sent me a refurbished phone (which, to be fair, has been just fine, but it pissed me off that my three month old phone got replaced by something that had already needed to be fixed). In January of 2020, I got Eric a Pixel 3a through Google Fi as I was making the switch. A few months ago, that phone's screen went out. It wasn't cracked or broken or anything and it still responded to touch, it just showed nothing but blackness. It too has been fine since being replaced, but in our admittedly small sample size, we've had a 100% failure rate of our initial phones. The Moto G4 and G5+ Eric and I had prior to the Pixels are quite cheap, low-end phones, but neither of them had to be replaced, nor did I ever have a cell phone need to be fixed during the warranty period ever before.
So, the moral of the story is don't buy Pixel phones.
Google has taken the dubious honor of being the worst company I've ever had the misfortune to have to deal with their customer service. They have unseated the previous reigning champion of Razer, who held the dishonor for a good nine years.
It all started with the battery in my Pixel 2 no longer holding a decent charge. Upon checking around to see about getting a replacement put in, I was informed that the screens are "paper thin" and that there was a good chance the screen would be broken upon removal. The companies involved, including the authorized Google repair company UBreakIFix, expect you to pay for their mistake if they break the screen, more than doubling the cost. With the screen, it was going to be about $180 (I assume before tax). While I've been very happy with my phone except for the battery life, putting out nearly $200 for a phone that's most likely going to need to be replaced in a year tops seemed a poor value. Due to my satisfaction with my Pixel 2, I leaned towards the Pixel 5 right away, but even after I looked at other phones, it seemed the best fit for my desires of excellent camera, water resistance, and battery life. I would have been satisfied with something like the 4a or 4a 5G if water resistance had been on either of them, but since it wasn't, the 5 it was.
I made my order and waited. It shipped via OnTrac on November 2nd, with an estimated delivery of November 4th-5th. At 8:15 pm on Wednesday, November 4th, I got an email that it had been delivered at 8:05 pm. I went out to get it and...nothing. I checked the neighbors in front of me, the most common recipient of misplaced packages. Nothing. Given the time, it didn't occur to me that OnTrac would have customer service open, but I did immediately contact Google's support chat. I was told my issue had to be escalated and I would receive an email from their product specialists in 1-2 business days.
The next day, Thursday, November 5th, I called OnTrac. In all of the mess that followed, I do have to give them credit for one thing-it is extremely easy to actually get to talk to a person that is located in the country (so no bad cross-ocean phone lines or language barriers interfering with communication). All you have to do is go through two short menus and punch in your tracking code and the times I was put in a queue, it was only for a couple of minutes. The first agent I spoke with said that he would page the driver and find out what had happened with the package, whether he had left it somewhere (and if so, where) or if he perhaps still had it on his truck. He promised to call back within 45 minutes whether he'd heard back or not. About 40 minutes later, he called. He said the driver still had the package and was going to be in the area by 5:30 pm and deliver it then. About 5:20 pm, I checked outside, and nothing. Since I hadn't waited fully until 5:30 pm to check and given that delivery estimates can be derailed by things such as traffic, I gave it another hour and checked again. Nothing. I called OnTrac again at 6:30 pm to try to find out what was happening. This agent told me that the driver did not have the package, that the 5:30 pm event was just supposed to be him attempted to locate the package at the area he delivered it to. I pointed out that was clearly futile twenty-one hours after delivery and asked to speak to someone at the local hub. He said that was not possible. I asked for a phone number. He said they had only an internal system at the hubs and had no direct phone lines. I asked to be transferred. He said their internal system did not do this. He said he would forward the information to the hub and if I hadn't gotten a call by ten or twelve the next day that I should call back.
I attempted to talk to Google about all of this. Once the chat personnel looked at my file, she said it had already been escalated to a product specialist and I would receive a reply by email and then she kicked me out of the chat. Meanwhile, I had received no emails from the product specialists, just an email from someone assuring me that I'd get an email from the product specialists. I replies to the email, explaining what I'd encountered with OnTrac, that the package was lost, that I'd been kicked out of customer service chat, and that all of this was not okay and that I needed a new phone sent to me the way any other major company would do. Six hours later, I received an email saying that my issue had been escalated to the product specialists and asking what OnTrac had told me. I sent another email with even more detailed descriptions of my every call with OnTrac from the day. I then got a reply that all my info had been forwarded to the higher end support team.
Friday, November 6th came. I had not received a call, so about 1:00 pm, I called OnTrac again. The agent I spoke to said that my file had notes indicating that someone from the Salt Lake hub had called me and left a message (I believe the name was Rhea). I had not received a call or any voice mails and I said as much. The agent said they would forward on my info again and I should receive a call shortly (I was told a time frame, but at this point I'd been getting put off for x amount of time so much, the specifics of each individual time are blurring together). I received no phone call during this time frame. I called back and said as much, and having had enough of this back and forth with nothing happening, I demanded to speak to a supervisor. I was handed over to Brett, who said he was going to page the Salt Lake hub again. I went ahead and gave him a second number to pass along as well just in case. I strongly suspected that they were not being truthful to me about having called, as the very first agent I spoke with had been able to get through to me just fine, but I wanted to cover my bases just in case Google's spam filtering had caught them. He told me to expect a call by 7:00 pm and if I hadn't gotten one, to call back and ask for him. I asked if he had an extension or direct line. He told me no. I asked if there was some sort of employee number I needed to be able to be connected back to him. He said no, he was the only Brett in the office and to just ask for him.
At some point in the afternoon while waiting for phone calls, I went ahead and tried the Google angle again, this time having them call me. I went round and round with an agent, who would not escalate me (in fact, initially told me there were no supervisors) and could not or would not help me. I pointed out that it had been nearly two full business days since I'd initiated contact with Google and that we were about to go into the weekend and I could not be waiting until Monday to even hope to get a response. Given the number of people at Google who would literally do nothing for me, I expect that their first tier of support is given no power to do anything but read scripts, but it's ridiculous that it's so difficult to get any sort of help even for such a basic thing. Adding to the frustration is that I got told by multiple people at Google that OnTrac had to contact them before they could do anything to help me and multiple people at OnTrac told me that Google as the shipper had to contact them for anything more to be done.
7:00 pm came with, naturally, no call. I called OnTrac back and asked to speak to Brett. I was on hold for a very long time (the irony did not escape me of how nice it would have been to have the new "Hold for Me" feature on the Pixel 5 here) and was finally told he wasn't available and she'd leave a message for him to call me back. I waited about 45 minutes, and when I got no call, I once again called OnTrac. After another very long hold, I was told that Brett was still available. When I was offered another supervisor, Genevieve, I wearily agreed. She once again reassured me they were going to get to the bottom of this and she was going to email/ping/page/whatever the Salt Lake hub again. I was told I should get a call by 8:45 pm and that if I didn't, she was going to be in the office until 10:00 pm.
A bit after 8:45 pm and of course, still no call. I called again, asking for Brett or Genevieve. This time, Brett was finally able to be found. We discussed the situation again, he said he'd page them again, and as we were talking, I got the notification of an incoming call. I wrapped up the call with Brett, took the new one, and lo and behold, it was Maria at the Salt Lake hub. Note that she was able to call me just fine, indicating the previous times I'd been told I'd been called could not have been true. We went over the situation again and she said something about having just found out about this because there was some system being upgraded and she'd only now gotten the emails about the mess. She said she was going to call the driver's manager and get to the bottom of this. She also gave me her phone number and extension, proving that I'd also been lied to about there being no way to call the Salt Lake hub. I had strongly suspected at the time that it was a lie, which is maddening. If it's policy, just say you it's company policy that you can't give it out. I get that low level customer service agents have weird limitations like that. Don't lie to me.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, I get yet another call (again showing that real calls get through just fine). This time it was Vanessa, the driver's manager. She had talked to him and...my package was sitting on his truck, heading back to Salt Lake. He'd marked it as delivered when he had done no such thing. He then spent days driving around with it floating around in his truck with no one but him aware of it instead of following whatever procedure should be taken at OnTrac for packages that couldn't be delivered. He didn't attempt to deliver it again either. I asked her why he'd marked it as delivered when he hadn't done it and she said she'd asked the same thing and he said he thought he was at the right place and then couldn't find it. My husband, with his long experience dealing with drivers doing this kind of crap in his employment at a different shipping company, was disgusted. "You never, ever mark a package as delivered until you have actually delivered it," he says. However, OnTrac does not deliver on the weekends. Because of the driver's failure to do any number of things right, I was going to have to wait until Monday to get my phone.
I passed along what info I had to Google, though I'd been told so many different stories at this point, I didn't know what was the reality of the situation. The driver doing one bad thing after another had a ring of truth to it, especially with how exasperated his manager sounded, but hey, the very first thing I'd been told was that it was on his truck only to be later told that wasn't true, so what did I know. Over the weekend, I got a couple more emails from the same person I'd corresponded with before assuring me that the team was waiting for a response from the shipper and that I'd hear back from them soon. I still had never received a response from anyone able to do anything.
Monday came and in the early afternoon, I tried to call Maria at the Salt Lake hub to ensure my package was going to be delivered today. No answer, so I left a message. I imagine that was the right choice, as at 3:13 pm, I got a call from her. The driver was trying to deliver my package but thought no one was home. I said we hadn't heard him and I'd be right out. I'm not sure he'd actually tried knocking (though to be fair, we probably wouldn't have heard), because he was just sitting there outside my gate. Finally, my package. Ironically, after all that and him almost leaving with my package again, he didn't even ask for the signature that was supposed to be required.
One would think that would be the end of the nightmare phone saga, but alas, it is not. I'd spent some of the weekend lurking at the GooglePixel subreddit and seen a number of other people having various issues with either their Pixel 5, Google's customer service, or both. Upon opening my phone, I immediately checked for the large screen gap a number of the phones have had. I was relieved to see it did not and looked fine all around, so I put a screen protector and case on it and started getting it set up. Then I started calling first my dad, then my mom, to see how it was working. Both of them were busy and couldn't talk except to say they couldn't talk, but the little I heard was not encouraging. I'm not exactly an audiophile, so the reports of bad sound really hadn't worried me, but what I'd heard on the phone was really, really bad. I did some more reading so that when my mom was finally free enough to speak, I knew to try holding the phone with my ear below the top edge instead of right at is as we've been trained to do with phones for longer than I've been alive. We talked for 45 minutes or despite my adjusting my ear to various spots on the surface of the phone, the sound was terrible. It was muffled while also having a weird, tinny kind of echo. Just awful. Given that the primary function of a phone is to be able to make calls to people and be able to communicate with them, I knew I couldn't live with this for the next three or four years.
Now, some people have had actual sound problems with their Pixel 5's and some just can't stand the way the under-display speaker sounds. Since I had no others to compare with the way some people did, I hadn't the slightest whether it was an actual problem or if it was just the fundamental design flaw of the upper speaker. I was done. I was not going to be keeping this phone that couldn't even make calls I could hear clearly. I really didn't want to pay the $35 restocking fee imposed by the Google Store, so I hopped in chat with customer service.
In retrospect, I obviously wasn't going to get help. These people specialize in customer disservice. But I thought, "Surely this isn't a big deal, just send me an RMA form with a tag on my account to not charge me the restocking fee!" So into chat I went and explained that since I'd had so much trouble with them and since I wasn't sure if it was a device issue or a design flaw, I wanted the restocking fee waived. I was told I'd get an email within ten business days responding to my request. Ten business days! Keep in mind that their return window is two weeks and it had been marked in the system as delivered on November 4th. I pointed all that out and that I didn't want to risk being told no return because I was outside the window. "We wouldn't do that since you contacted us today," she said. I might have been naive enough to get into chat to try to get the restocking fee removed, but I wasn't naive enough to believe that, especially with stories on Reddit of people receiving packages with phones missing and phones RMA'ed to be repaired "magically" disappearing with Google refusing to do anything about it. I asked for a supervisor and was told I could get a response from one in 1-2 business days. Yeah, I've heard that one before too.
And so I caved and used the automated system to generate an RMA label so I can get this phone gone and get (mostly) refunded and proceed to divest myself with as much to do with Google as possible. I have been on Google Fi for my cellular network for most of the year and was about to add another line. Won't be doing that now. Turns out US Mobile, who I had service from before, has some even better plans for me now, so I'm happily switching back and setting up the new line there as well. Eric will have to remain on Fi until we have the money to pay off the rest of his phone in a lump sum, but once that's taken care of, I'll be switching his service as well. I'd planned to get Google Fiber if they ever made it up here. Won't be now. I've encouraged people to get Pixels in the past, in fact having urged my mom to get a 4a just a couple of weeks ago. I will be directing people away from Google, and especially their physical phones, at every point possible from now on. This was a nightmare spanning days that should never have happened. When the phone was nowhere to be found, they should have acted like every other large corporation and issued a new phone shipment to me while they worked with OnTrac to locate the package or get reimbursed through whatever their insurance or contract is with them. Expecting me to do the legwork when I'm not the shipper and have no pull on OnTrac and I can't even trigger things like reimbursement from the insurance is ridiculous. Being told by both companies that they had to hear from the other one while apparently no one but me would actually talk to anyone is beyond ridiculous. I still to this point have not received any sort of contact from the higher end support team. Given their ubiquity across any number of industries and back end web stuff the user can't see, I won't suggest that others should avoid all Google products entirely. I would, however, encourage you to stay away from any of their physical products such as the Pixel, the Pixelbook, their smart speakers, Nest stuff, etc. Aside from their terrible customer service, I realized as I thought about my bad experience that their hardware has a very high failure rate from my own personal experience. In March of 2018, my dad got a Pixel 2XL from Verizon. It flat out didn't work and had to be replaced immediately (fortunately, that was done through Verizon, so was a quick and easy exchange). I got my Pixel 2 in April 2018 and in either June or July that summer, I got the infamous camera bug where the camera just stopped working with nothing fixing the issue. I got that replaced and even though it was very much under warranty and had been so new when the problem occurred, they sent me a refurbished phone (which, to be fair, has been just fine, but it pissed me off that my three month old phone got replaced by something that had already needed to be fixed). In January of 2020, I got Eric a Pixel 3a through Google Fi as I was making the switch. A few months ago, that phone's screen went out. It wasn't cracked or broken or anything and it still responded to touch, it just showed nothing but blackness. It too has been fine since being replaced, but in our admittedly small sample size, we've had a 100% failure rate of our initial phones. The Moto G4 and G5+ Eric and I had prior to the Pixels are quite cheap, low-end phones, but neither of them had to be replaced, nor did I ever have a cell phone need to be fixed during the warranty period ever before.
So, the moral of the story is don't buy Pixel phones.