Moments ago, I dumped my entire Verizon holdings, taking a 29% bath on my investment. While I don’t enjoy losing big sums of money in my stock portfolio, the loss restored my faith in the universe—and in karma. Shame on me for buying Verizon stock in the first place, especially given my original investment rationale.
As I admitted in a post four years ago, I regarded Verizon as a pathetic, ethically challenged company whose CEO, Hans Vestberg, seemed intent on running a business that perennially alienated longtime customers and confined them to automation hell. If you had a billing or service issue, you could expect a maddening phone tree and a chatbot trained by the DMV. Once when I finally got a human on the line, the agent was utterly unfazed by my threat to cancel—she even offered to text me a link to port my number elsewhere.
Back then, I believed Verizon was the least bad of the major wireless carriers, with faster, more reliable coverage. Cousin Rob warned me that if I switched to T-Mobile, I’d have issues calling or driving through the San Fernando Valley. In nine years of living in Los Angeles, I’ve barely set foot in the Valley—but I feared that if I ever met the woman of my dreams in Tarzana, a dropped call might end the romance before it started.
I wasn’t alone in viewing Verizon as a necessary evil. My thinking was: I may hate the company, but others are stuck with it too—so why not profit from our communal misery? I figured Vestberg’s customer indifference and cost-cutting would lead to higher profits and stock appreciation.
I subsequently discovered Verizon was indeed very much replaceable.
Free Cellular Service
Spectrum—my local cable company—has dramatically improved its customer service, relocating its support operations back to the U.S. after subjecting its customers to years of offshore staffed punishment. When I called to ask about lowering my bill, a helpful agent told me Spectrum had launched a year of free wireless service that ran on Verizon’s own towers. Essentially the same service and no contract.
Best of all: I’d never have to deal with Verizon again.
I bit. That was more than a year ago.
Today, I’m paying $30 a month—half of what I paid Verizon—and I’ve never had surprise fees, overage charges, or connection issues. And just last week, Cousin Rob called me while I was in Tarzana (at a dog training facility I recently joined). We talked for ten minutes. Clear as a bell.
Verizon Customer Enlightenment
Turns out more customers are seeing the light—and leaving Verizon in droves.
In the first half of this year, Verizon lost nearly 300,000 postpaid customers, while AT&T added 750,000 and T-Mobile surged ahead with 1.4 million. Spectrum’s parent company, Charter, added one million new mobile lines, and Comcast added another 701,000. In an industry where subscriber growth is the clearest sign of customer trust and brand health, Verizon is the only major wireless carrier moving in reverse.
So how did Hans Vestberg respond?
a) Issue a company-wide alert: Treat remaining customers with kid gloves.
b) Alienated even more customers.
If you guessed b, congratulations: you understand Verizon.
“Loyalty” discounts
For years, Verizon offered “loyalty discounts” to entice fleeing customers to stay—$10 to $40 off monthly bills, often tied to phone upgrades or multi-year contracts. But recently, those discounts started vanishing without warning. Customers complained. Verizon gaslit. Eventually, the truth emerged: the company was eliminating loyalty discounts altogether.
Vestberg, who received $24.1 million in compensation last year, told Wall Street that Verizon would now prioritize “high-quality” customers—a corporate euphemism for people who don’t ask questions and don’t mind getting royally screwed.
After an online firestorm, Verizon may have walked back some of the change. One PhoneArena commenter said a rep told him the decision was reversed because of bad publicity. But if you know Verizon, you know the retreat possibly only applies to people who bother to complain. Meanwhile, the company is still moving ahead with other price hikes—raising its activation fee from $35 to $45, and its tablet plan by another $5 a month.
The iPhone 16 Swindle
“Get a free iPhone 16,” the company’s ads claim, as if Vestberg had a socialist awakening and decided to redistribute smartphones like Zohran Mamdani at a Brooklyn food co-op. The only thing free about Verizon’s iPhone 16 is the shamelessness with which the offer is marketed.
Here’s the con: You’re not getting a free phone—you’re getting a 36-month noose. Each month, Verizon applies a tiny credit—but only if you stay locked into one of their bloated Unlimited plans. Switch plans, cancel early, or miss a clause in the microscopic fine print? You’re paying full price for a phone that was “on the house.”
Worse, those Unlimited plans are stuffed with throttled data, junk streaming add-ons, and surveillance-grade bundling.
Meet Hans’ Board Enablers
You can judge a corporation by the company its CEO keeps. And Verizon’s board—whose members are paid $250,000 to $410,000 a year—speaks volumes.
- Dan Schulman, lead independent director, was CEO of PayPal when its stock collapsed more than 75% in two years. Verizon rewarded him with board leadership. His elevation to lead governance at Verizon has been criticized as “rewarding failure.”
- Laxman Narasimhan, former Starbucks CEO, oversaw a stretch that his successor called “mismanaged.”
- Carol Tomé, CEO of UPS, has presided over delivery breakdowns, labor unrest, and a 40% drop in stock value since 2020. She famously slashed Amazon deliveries—another “high-quality customer” play that Wall Street hated.
- Caroline Litchfield, CFO of Merck, has spent more than 30 years inside a company whose legacy includes the Vioxx and Propecia scandals—both involving serious health risks the company was accused of downplaying — controversies that still cast a shadow over the company’s ethical track record. Given her long tenure at Merck—including leadership roles in its Human Health division during major public health controversies—it’s not hard to imagine why she’d be comfortable with Verizon’s marketing ethics.
- Roxanne Austin, who chairs Verizon’s audit committee while simultaneously running Austin Investment Advisors and sitting on boards at AbbVie, CrowdStrike, and Freshworks. That’s four active boards—when governance experts say three is the absolute maximum. AbbVie’s stock has been good to me personally, but I’ll be revisiting that position now that I know who’s overseeing it. (Austin is the lead director)
Vestberg’s Golden Parachute
If Verizon’s board ever shows a pulse and gave Hans Vestberg the boot, he’d be just fine. His severance package reportedly is a guaranteed $40 million—a reward for overseeing declining subscribers, customer rage, and a flat lining brand.
“It is obnoxious,” said the late Jack Cohen, longtime chair of the Association of BellTel Retirees, a major Verizon shareholder group. “The optics are terrible, and as a shareholder I’m frankly embarrassed.”
That was years ago. These days, it’s just business as usual in corporate America.