Originally Posted by televisor

As a European I was hugely surprised to see that bag claims are open to all. OTOH I've heard more complaints about bag-wait times in the US, so maybe the two are related: you can at least meet people who are picking you up while you're waiting for your bags.

The only place I've seen tag-checking was in China, that was at an international arrival carrousel which was before customs, I've got no idea whether domestic arrivals let everyone into the bag-claim or not.

(In Europe you usually first exit from the secured area to the bag claim, then from there go via "customs" to the public area. For intra-EU flights there's technically no customs so you exit via a separate EU channel - but all bags still go to the same claim.)