I must disagree. The whole point of this discussion is that underpaying demonstrates greed. Restaurants in the USA want to be able to advertise low prices and shame customers into paying extra in the form of tips, rather than paying their workers properly in the first place.

Unfortunately, instead of the US governments at various levels cracking down on this type of disgraceful attitude towards adding charges to advertised prices, they tend to perpetuate it themselves by having all manner of taxes and allowing those also to be added to bills.

Any country with decent consumer protection laws forces advertised prices to be inclusive of all taxes and charges, so that the consumer gets to pay exactly what is quoted. In the US, where the businesses pay the government to ignore customer issues as much as possible, hotels get to advertise $99 rooms that might actually cost $130 with taxes and tips, restaurants get to advertise $50 meals that will actually cost $65 and so on. In other places, this omission of necessary or expected charges would be called fraud.

The worst thing about the tipping issue is that it's accepted as a percentage in so many cases and thus is usually totally unrepresentative of the service received.

If I order a $10 meal or a $40 meal and the server does the same amount of work, why does the one in the latter case deserve 4 times the tip? If a waiter is serving 10 tables in an hour and getting $10 per table, they are getting an amazing $100/hour for unskilled work. Meanwhile, a waiter who is just as deserving but works in a cheap joint may only have 1 table an hour and get a $2 tip.

There are ways that tipping can work fairly, but paying out a standardised 15% (or any other particular percentage) is just absurd.