I recall reading something about there being a “shift compliment” wherein there’s supposed to be a certain ratio of shifts to baristas based on the store’s total labor hours. As in, it’s acceptable to have 1 shift and 1 barista during open and close because you need to have a Keyholder at the store at all times and most stores have a minimum partner number of 2 partners. However, if the store’s labor calls for 4 partners, 3 of those four shouldn’t be SSVs unless there’s a problem with availability, only one should realistically be a SSV.

Likewise, there’s a set number of shifts a store should have based on its hours of operation to meet the requirement of at least 1 Keyholder present and minimal OT.

This is partly to keep labor payrolls down, but also to prevent SMs from promoting baristas to SSVs just because, or because they want to try and give their partners a raise. A good SM should keep the store’s hours of operations and ratio of SSVs to baristas in check.

tldr: yes, I’m pretty sure it’s officially a thing, but I don’t know how enforceable it is nor do I know how often it is actually enforced.

It's a new push from corporate from what I can tell. They don't want to "waste" labor by having more than one Shift on at a time. My manager just recently mentioned that she's being pressured to cut out any overlap between SSVs when making the schedule, so it seems like company wide push

Og here. Yes the rule is SSV can only cover SSV shifts and same goes for baristas. We get a certain amount of hours for barista and SSV to divide because of pay. SSV picking up barista is against labor. But some manager aren’t properly trained on labor and don’t care as long as the shift is covered.

This seems to circle back around every few years - shift compliment is a thing, when I was an SM we had a morning, mid and night shift every day - their shifts could only overlap by 30 minutes at most.