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Starting an article by referring to countries that work without tipping cultures and then finishing it and naming it to say it can't happen is astonishing exceptionalism.

I don't think that's quite what the article meant to imply.

> “Danny Meyer and Andrew Tarlow wanted to go one step beyond and eliminate tipping altogether,” Jayaraman says. “But it’s challenging to do that on your own without a policy change that requires everyone to be paid a full minimum wage.”

Rather than arguing that the US is totally unique and therefore tip-free service is impossible, the author points out that the barrier is that the US lacks some basic policies that the aforementioned no-tip cultures presumably have (although "Europe and Asia" is pretty nebulous and I don't pretend to grok the labor laws of every country that could possibly refer to). We could probably argue all day over what "American exceptionalism" actually means, but I've generally associated that term with fuzzy just-so-story-esque generalizations about American weirdness rather than with grounded arguments as to the specific causes of the weirdness. This article seems to be more of the latter than the former.

Lots of luck to those who wish to make tips go away. The electorate of the District of Columbia voted in a referendum, not to eliminate tipping, but to eliminate the "tipped minimum wage". The city council then overturned this.

Getting rid of tips is like switching to the metric system. It won't happen in North America, unfortunately.

Why Tips Won