Quit my Publix job and I feel worthless

I was hired three months ago as a produce clerk. I spent every shift in the fruit cut bar, chopping melons into cubes and packaging them to be sold. I had to get up every morning at 4:00 to be there at 5:00. Hours were long, the work was thankless and monotonous. Although I worked between 35 and 40 hours per week, I was only “part-time” so I didn’t even get benefits. Management seemed to exist for the sole purpose of popping into the cutbar every hour or two to glance at what we were doing and criticize anything out of the ordinary they saw, write it up, and disappear as quickly as they came.

My department manager in particular enjoyed micromanaging every aspect of my position — fruit had to be cut his way, items had to be tagged using his preferred method, no earbuds when the store opens at 7:00, etc. He had all of these expectations that we were to follow protocol to the letter, and yet also insisted that we were to meet our production quota (finish the list) or have our hours reduced as punishment. He would constantly come into the cutbar just to verbally abuse people whom he felt weren’t cutting fast enough.

One of his “rules” was that we couldn’t leave more than two trays’ worth of fruit bowls sitting on a rack outside of the freezer at any given time. To explain: we stored our products on these wheeled racks, with shelves to hold about 10 trays each. Each tray could hold about 12 small bowls of fruit. His reasoning for this rule was that it took about 4 hours for unrefrigerated fruit to begin to spoil, and so by limiting the amount of cut fruit that was outside the freezer to two trays, you minimized the time fruit stayed outside of the freezer. Okay, fine — I’ll load up the rack with two dozen small watermelon bowls and then shove it in the freezer. Nope! Other employees who were working to stock the sales floor wouldn’t look to see whether the small bowls stored in the freezer had price tags on them yet, and so unpriced items were being loaded into the cutbar whenever the freezer was used for temporary storage. So the only option he would accept was forcing us to stop every 20-30 minutes to take our multiple layers of gloves off, move the cart to the scan machine, scan each individual bowl one-by-one, and then put the cart back in the freezer. This obviously was a huge blow to production speed, as each individual instance of de-gloving, re-gloving, scanning, re-storing the cart, etc was about 10 additional minutes, which over an 8-hour period would sap between 1.5 and 2 hours of our time.

I was placed in this impossible situation where I either skirted his rules and the production list got done (and I wasn’t yelled at and had my hours cut) or I followed his rules to the letter, and got yelled at and had my hours cut. So I did the former, and the production list was finished at the cost of the occasional tray going out without a price tag (this happened like once every 3 days). Manager found out I had been putting untagged bowls in the freezer and decided to cut my hours from 35 a week to 7. Called me into his office and said “your current hours are a reflection of your work performance”.

The early morning hours, combined with the stressful, yet monotonous job, coupled with having worked my ass off to make sure the production quota was met, made me give my two weeks’ notice the day after he let me know he had reduced my hours on purpose. It’s just not worth $16 an hour with zero benefits and having to beg my manager to give me my hours back.

Although I feel relief knowing I’m out of that toxic environment, internally I feel a sense of shame. Yes, I did openly break the rules. I only lasted 3 months at what’s supposed to be an entry-level job. What does this say about me? Am I a maverick? Am I unemployable? Was there something else I did to piss off my manager and this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back? This was my first job and I somehow managed to bomb it in record time. I feel like a failure.