> There was an episode of "Adam Ruins Everything" about this. Basically, during prohibition, restaurants couldn't sell alcohol (which was their biggest profit center), so in order to stay afloat, they cut staff wages and introduced the concept of tipping to cover the gap.

So, I guess its time for an episode of “Dragonwriter Ruins Adam Ruins Everything”.

Americans imported the practice of tipping from Europe just after the civil war (some accounts say as an excuse for restaurant owners not to pay newly-freed blacks working as servers, but that's less than clear, though where such workers were common, it was certainly leveraged for that purpose), and there was criticism of the new but rapidly-spreading practice as unamerican and pro-aristocratic in the late 19th Century, before prohibition.

Heck, here's a pre-Prohibition (1916) book about the practice of tipping in America, which even recounts past legislative efforts to stop it:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33170/33170-h/33170-h.htm

So, no, it didn't start in response to Prohibition.