People get the cause and effect backwards on that. The minimum wage is lower because lawmakers knew they were already getting compensated by tips. It's a social custom, not charity.
Those reduced minimum wages are justified because the jobs include tipping.
The reason you tip your waiter is (ostensibly) because it creates a direct incentive for better service, by leaving some of the compensation up to the customer.
Let's not have a bunch of replies that ignore my caveat please.
Funny how service is as good if not better in the vast majority of the rest of the world, despite a lack of tipping culture.
I think its more of a cultural thing than an effect of tipping, but service in the US is usually pretty high quality.
"service with a FORCED smile" which I find far worse than service without a smile.
and
"PRETEND the customer is always right" which happens in non-tipping culture too (do whatever makes the least trouble for yourself at work).
Any Asian country I've been to had much better service than the US. France (Paris) had excellent service. Greece had extremely nice service. These are all low- or no- tipping places.
If you knew everyone was getting paid the minimum wage, would you still tip on a regular basis?
I recently learned that in states like Washington, California, Oregon this is the case [1], and have been tipping less as a result, but still feel slightly bad about it (societal conditioning is strong!).
[1]https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped