I always had my thoughts clear on the matter: Business owners successfully shifted the responsibility of paying their employees an actual salary towards the customers. Servers, are at the mercy of the customer's good will, who can actually give them nothing with 0 consequences, meaning that they've worked for free.
However, I've been lurking on r/Serverlife and I'm a bit surprised with some of the things I see. People defending the tipping system like crazy, and talking about making 80/100K a year, or 40k during the summer. Moreover, arguments about how this system is better than being salaried considering you're “sharing the profits” with the owner, since you make a percentage of the income, and how a lot of it isn't subjected to taxes, etc.
I basically wanted to know what do servers in this sub think about this.
Here one example I ran into:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Serverlife/comments/14wvgus/love_this_job_how_do_i_quit/
But also can't find one I saw where someone was tipped 5k for a single table, and it wasn't the first time they were hitting 4 digits.