Key phrase is "used to". That kind of scheduling is crap some MBA that's never run a business came up with and that no store that employs people is actively doing or at least not for long. It spent a few years bouncing around from company to company in the 2010s. I'd be surprised if anyone still does it.
Your local big box store will regularly schedule people because it's a) free and b) improves employee productivity, reduces no-shows, etc, etc. They'd basically be giving up free money not to. Furthermore these kinds of employees often have complex transportation arrangements to giving them a regular schedule greatly improves their reliability.
The people who are new or the unreliable guy or whatever will still get crap hours because you've gotta have someone to absorb the week to week oddities in the schedule but generally speaking regular employees get regular hours.
A bunch of the big box stores tried this at one point or another. Pretty much all the local stores ignored or overrode it where possible (because it's so bad you don't even need to do it to know it's stupid). And then corporate realized it was stupid and stopped.
The people implying this is typical are only one step of whoever came up with it. Because it's simply and obviously not, and anyone who's ever had to manage employee schedules knows that this kind of scheduling is just not tenable, even less so for the kinds of McJobs where people always assert this is the case. Best case this kind of scheduling is a fast path to massive turnover which wastes money. You can't treat minimum wage employees you on-boarded over the course of a morning like this because the will just go somewhere else and be on-boarded over the course of a different morning. "Cog in the machine" policy and efficient on-boarding are two way streets.