Be direct. Tell your shift you need bar practice and are going to bar 2 after your break or whatever lol.

I'm also new (started around the end of February) and haven't gotten a lot of time on bar (a heck of a lot of time on DTR/DTO though) and I find it helpful to close my eyes and visual making drink orders in my head. I talk to myself a lot and make the hand motions as if I'm actually making the drinks 🤷🏻‍♀️ I feel like it's helped a lot and my coworkers have been saying I'm getting pretty strong on bar - I even help out the baristas who are even newer than me (teach to solidify your understanding!) Hope it helps!

Talk to your shifts, and ask the abr partners if you can make a few drinks when it's slower or you don't have any cars. As a long time shift sometimes I just forget to give newer partners bar time until they say something to me about it. And this is much more likely to happen with newer shifts. And if your shifts don't start trying to get you bar time, ask your SM. Everyone in the store is better off if everyone can do all positions to a similar standard.

Same here. At least I know my SM and SSV are aware but I’m on mid day and we exist in a permanent peak like many other DT plus cafe stores. But our severe business is enhanced by the recent closure of a DT/Cafe sister store less than a mile away

Honestly if you work during peak, don’t expect a lot of bar time at least main bar (bar 1). That’s how I was when I got moved to a busier DT Store in my district. Which I’m glad they did because I’m not 100% good at bar mostly sequencing. Even then when I got hired (hired as a SSV) I couldn’t get a lot of bar time as I spent a lot of time doing my task and not enough time.

do you ever open? opening is what really helped me get good (or at least decent) at bar, since when you’re an opening barista you’re guaranteed to be on either bar or warming when the store opens. my store opens at 4am and is very slow for the first hour or so, and consistently being on bar during that hour gave me tons of practice without a lot of rushing or stress. if you’re able to, ask your sm about becoming an opener and then when/if you do open, let the opening ssv know you’d like to do bar at open :)

I started around the end of February and I haven’t really gotten a bunch of bar time yet either, but I asked my SM and ASM to get more late/closing shifts so that I can get more time to be on bar because it’s usually slower in the afternoon and in the evenings. I would say talk to your manager and ask them for more bar time, that’s what I did and I got some bar time yesterday!