Elsewhere in the world, there is much less of a tipping custom, and wages for service staff tend to reflect that.
Isn't there some kind of US law that requires restaurants to pay the difference between wage+tips & minimum wage if the tips share is low enough?
(OTOH, I recall reading somewhere about people paying huge sums (order of $10's of K) for high-profile service jobs like Maître d' at a prestigious hotel, or head waiter in a high-class restaurant, due to the quantity earned in tips)
There is but that doesn't mean restaurants necessarily follow said law. A lot of servers don't really have any means of actually properly enforcing it without just straight up losing their job in the best case so, in practice, you find people just staying silent as they get shafted.
My position is that the way this is set up in the USA is plain wrong - tips should be a voluntary gratuity from the customer to thank the waiter for a job well done.
Once that is the case, then establishment's only responsibility is to pay the employee a minimum living wage, making no assumptions about tips. This is pretty much the way it works in a large swathe of the world, and seems to be working pretty well.
also, there is an immense range of compensation for servers, depending on the restaurant in question. any restaurant that you go to where the servers make a decent amount of money definitely requires skill.