The actual scam is that restaurants can and do pay wait staff below minimum wage (like 2-3$), because it’s explicitly allowed, with expectation that the rest comes from tips. So not tipping in USA may in some cases be an asshole move.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
And as other commenter correctly pointed out, by the federal law of hour wage plus tips is below federal minimum wage, the restaurant must pay extra to reach the minimum wage. So if we assume that restaurants actually follow this law, wait staff will be kept at poverty wage 7.25/hr.
But also actually demanding those wages if you dont get enough tip money is a great way for them to get fired. And if they are that poor to work in those conditions they will have a hard time scraping the money to go to court to get an unlawful dismissal case.
But servers are the only industry where they demand we the consumer take care of the problem because they're unwilling to do so themselves:
"Hard time scraping the money to go to court"? You don't go to court, you go to the DOL with your documentation.
"If you don't tip I have to pay/pay taxes to serve you" - no, you don't. The IRS assumes that you get a certain amount of tips. If you document that you got less, then guess what, they tax you on that.
Know why servers don't like to do that? Because the IRS assumption is that the average tip is 8%. What proportion of a server's customers do we think don't tip versus those who tip more than 8%?
"That's a lot of work" No. IRS Form 4070 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f4070--2005.pdf) charitably takes less than five minutes a month to fill out.
"I'll get fired". Sure. That's a risk, I admit, and easy for me to say "You need to risk something". Inertia is a powerful thing. How many servers getting fired for fighting wage theft is enough to make a restaurant start to have problems?
Not in all U.S. states, for example California.
Anyways I remember the hamburger place because they didn’t ask for, or even allowed us, to tip. The price was all-in.
It’s a breath of fresh air! More restaurants should advertise with this feature.
As someone who has previously worked for that wage and finally did "get a different job," there was no "just" about it. I had the support of well-off family who were willing to significantly contribute to my education and living situation, and it still took years of hard toil (all while being nearly destitute) before ever achieving anything resembling financial stability. That was not (and likely never will be) an option for 90-95% of the people I worked with in the food-service industry. There is absolutely no justification (beyond abject greed) for that type of poverty wage, and it's the responsibility of everyone in our society to prevent that type of exploitation of the vulnerable, precisely because they cannot afford to "lobby to change that" and often can't "get a different job" outside of the same industry.
I don't know what proportion of waiters are members, but the union for hospitality workers is one of the largest (possibly the largest) in Denmark: https://cf.3f.dk/english/wages-and-sectors/working-in-the-ho...
In Danish, the collective agreement they negotiated with McDonald's: https://www.3f.dk/-/media/files/artikler/overenskomst/privat...