There are laws in place for service workers related to minimum wage. The employers have to make up the difference if tips don’t meet the rate for hours worked. It seems to me that’s not sufficient for the times.
Hypothetically, if everyone were to stop tipping in the U.S. would things be better or worse for workers? Would employers start paying workers more?
It is definitely messed up, but it’s also the only reasonable way for people in a lot of more conservative states to make any money at all as service staff, because those states tend to have comically low base pay for servers because “they work for tips”.
It’s an intentionally self-perpetuating cycle that makes things more expensive for customers, and fails to pay the business’s workers what they deserve. It’s basically enhanced wage theft combined with a pricing structure that also intrinsically hides the fact that the business owner is also intentionally hiding something like 15-25% of their cost of business, and you get to make up the difference.