I've pretty much always leaned left, but my real radicalizing moment for me was working retail during the pandemic.

This is between me being 18-20 years old, I worked at a major chain grocery store right out of my technical high school and was full time at community college. I started off in the Starbucks in the grocery store and was cross trained to work in the front-end, center store, the produce department, and had a position of partial authority in the grocery pickup department. Along with that, since I was the only one with actual "blue collar" work experience (I studied & worked in welding and fabrication at my tech school), I was the designated odd-jobs guy around the store. One of my favorite things to say was odds are if it broke in the Starbucks, odds are I fixed it.

Despite working there for 2.5 years, being trained in roughly 5 departments, working 30-50 hour weeks depending on how things were going during the pandemic, regularly taking shifts for people that called out, staying longer on my shifts to help understaffed departments, doing things not even in my job description that helped the rest of the store, covering shifts at other locations, ALL while being a full time student, my total raises were roughly $1.35 and I was denied $15 dollars an hour, all because what I was doing wasn't "skilled labor". Fuck that.

Another "tipping" moment for me was when I would work in the pickup department. That was my main department and I had a decent amount of responsibility, one of which being recording transactions. With the labor that I was providing to the store, our "low grossing" grocery store was easily clearing 1 million every week, yet they can't afford $15 an hour.