For those who are complaining about tipping, the economics of a running a restaurant business necessitate the tipping. 44 percent of all restaurants fail in the first 3 years. Most are already operating on a string.
Restaurant Failure Rate Study
By having the compensation as tips and having the employees report their tips, as most employees tend to have the incentive to underreport their tips, this minimizes the amount of taxes the restaurant has to pay. So this process of tipping ends up being cost control for a restaurant.
The best servers are going to migrate to where they can make the best money, the server is your salesman in a restaurant, and they need to be able to read the customers in a way to maximize the bill for the owner while keeping the customer satisfied and happy, even as they spend more than they planned, and the tipping process is an incentive to do so. The best restaurants know how to select the best servers. To think anyone can be trained to be a good server means if you ran a restaurant you'd probably end up in the 44 percent category. Good servers are a tremendous source of information for management of a restaurant as well, their input from the front lines helps guide the changes and issues a restaurant needs to react to in order to succeed.
The guest arriving knows pretty much how much they are going to tip - usually somewhere between 15-20 percent and can with a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics know the impact on the cost of their meal and determine where they want to eat based on total costs of meals. Tipping allows the restaurant guest to exert control over the meal when it or the service is not up to par, especially if you are a regular guest of the restaurant and the owner of the restaurant to equalize compensation costs with the level of business for the restaurant.
As for complaining about the amount of money a server makes for 15 dollar hamburgers? If a server is making 200-300 a night for a six hour shift that means he or she is delivering 100 hamburgers per night in a sit down fashion or on average one every 3-4 minutes for 6 hours to customers, assuming a $10.00 margin on the hamburger that is $1,000 in variable margin for the owner to work with. That takes a real commitment to continue to hustle to make that wage "overpayment".
To pay servers hourly you will tend to get servers that slow down the process just a bit because making customer happy is now the only thing that counts you might now serve 80 hamburgers per shift and now the restaurant loses $200 in margin. The burger is going to need to be priced accordingly so to capitalize the servers wages, lets say $90 or $15 is "fair" pay and to account for lost margin the $15.00 hamburger becomes $17.25, $1.25 for server wages and $1.00 for the more relaxed pace of service in essence 15% more.
However those better servers will go to other $15 burger joints that pay tips and the process becomes a slide in quality that is often seen in poorer restaurants. This is the reason Yelp is successful, people tend to avoid poor quality in restaurants.
So in the end tipping reduces costs for the restaurant owner and matches revenues more closely with the relative level of business so moving to a model of no tipping to appeal to the crowd that is typically a cheaper customer and more likely to eat at Panera and Shake Shack is less likely to become a regular in a more expensive venue is in short a non starter.