I'm with Cris on this one. Why on earth shouldn't people who serve food simply be paid a decent wage in the first place.

Why should it be any different from say being served by someone in a shop or at Starbucks ? You'd presumably not expect to have to tip someone who served you in a shop just for doing their job ?

For reference, I do tip, but like pretty much everyone I know in the UK I almost always tip by the same 10%. If service it really awful then I won't tip at all. In practice service is rarely that bad, so 99% of the time I end up tipping the same 10%.

So I go along with it, because it is the done thing, but I think the whole setup stinks. I'd love to know how/why we ended up with this special case for restaurant waiters ?

The irony is, the person serving me in the shop is likely to be on the same level of pay as the waiter.

I do wish we had the level of service in the UK that I've experienced in the US. In general the service I received in US shops/restaurants was much better than the UK. It was particularly noticeable that even in large stores you'd get replies like "I'll see if I have that", it would be very rare in a UK shop to hear the assistant taking ownership of a request like that, "I don't know if we have it" is the more likely reply in the UK.