It isn't technically Google-operated: they've outsourced it, which is fairly common for promotional goods. (McDonalds doesn't specialize in making T-shirts, after all.)
What I find hilarious is that if you buy an $8 T-shirt from Google you can actually talk to a human being about it, which makes that approximately the only Google-brand product sold for under $100,000 where that is reliably true.
What I find hilarious is that if you buy an $8 T-shirt from Google you can actually talk to a human being about it, which makes that approximately the only Google-brand product sold for under $100,000 where that is reliably true.