It varies from store to store, but obviously you can’t expect the morning to clean as much because they are busy prepping for peak, setting up the pastry case, dating pastries, brewing teas/iced coffees, brewing coffee every 8 minutes, doing the morning food pull, doing the daily order, etc.

Be careful not to foster a morning vs night rivalry in your store. I’ve been doing it almost 15 years. All day parts. They all have good and bad things you have to deal with, and the attitude you should have is that everyone is doing their best.

The only thing on this list that isn’t a closing task at my store is ovens. Ovens are cleaned every day in the morning or mid day. Every other store I’ve worked at it’s been preclose. I don’t see why another day part would start the deposit. Floors would get too dirty if done early in the day.

The challenge about this is that closing is typically more task-heavy while morning deals with higher volume of customers; closing means you have to get your tasks done while balancing that with customers. They’re different types of flows.

I recommend front loading whatever you can. Do your ovens and urns early. Count some drawers early and get the bathrooms done ASAP. Do your lobby floors as early as you can, too- they don’t typically get dirty the way the line does. Pastry case, at least according to my DM, can be taken down 30 minutes before close- soon as it strikes that time, rip that sucker down. Take trash out throughout the shift if possible. Basically, divide and conquer - both in dispersing those tasks, and splitting them among baristas who can do it. For example, if you have someone on front or on CS, they can rinse urns or clean ovens between other tasks. Both tasks can be done split up over several 2-5 minute pieces. Make sure your CS is keeping up on dish as much as possible, same with restocks. If bar has any downtime, they can prep backups and get dishes ready to go back.

If you’re already dividing and conquering as much as possible and it’s not feeling like a reasonable amount of work, maybe it’s time to have a sit down with your SM about ways to make it easier on you. If you’re just feeling like it’s not balanced, remember that in some ways it isn’t (for example, closers so often have to pick up slack from morning/mid oopsies) but in general it is (for example, if you don’t finish stocking up, morning has to).

It’s hard to envision when your not used to the shift but a lot of these things are done by openers and mids just in different fashion.
Openers set up food that was delivered while closers pull expired food off the floor
Openers set up patio while closers pull in patio
Openers set up pastry case while closers breakdown pastry case.

The list goes on but day parts when done correctly have equal amount of responsibilities and importance when it comes to store operations

Our store sucks at using the clean safe and ready cards (two black racks on the wall w rows of cards separated by store area and day parts), some of them are blank and meant to be filled in w tasks specific to your store, but others have tasks printed on them for dayparts. It might be worth it to go through them and look to see if there are tasks the closers are doing that could be moved to other dayparts. One thing I like is for closing they have one card for the shift-only responsibilities and another card with a whole list of teamwork tasks. The teamwork tasks are good for when I’m closing w green beans bc they can pick them off the list without needing to ask me “what needs to get done” every 5 minutes.

Thanks for the responses!

We don’t have day part rivalries. I was just never really informed on what’s expected. I have been told that we missed things at close before, but was never told exactly what we have to do every night.

I try to set up morning crew as much as possible because i believe it trickle down through the day. The less they have to do in the morning the more can get done through the day to make it easier for my closers.

We are also pretty bad at using the CSR cards. 😬