Not true.

Australia does not have tipping in it's culture. We pay our wait staff fair and reasonable rates (legally mandated btw).

I don't really think our food costs are too much higher than the USA. And people eat out ALOT here.

Food tastes good, service is good. People want to come back.

Please expand your horizons.

I think the issue in the US is that it has only been tried at a store level rather than at a state or country level.

The whole west coast and many major cities in the US have eliminated the lower tipped minimum wages.

But the societal norm is to still expect to tip 15% (although some would say 20%) in tips.

Eh, service in Australia is generally not particularly great. This is often a function of staffing though, since wages are expensive (national minimum wage $19.84/hr) and many Australian restaurants consequently either operate with a skeleton staff, pay under the table (migrants/students are brutally exploited), or both.

Japan, on the other hand, has incredible service and absolutely no tips.

> We pay our wait staff fair and reasonable rates (legally mandated btw).

Most people I know in Melbourne who worked in restaurants said they got less than minimum wage with cash in hand. Almost all these people were on a working holiday visa or students.

Yeesh. I should've said that it was tried in the US and didn't catch on. Not having a tipping culture to begin with is great, but the hard part is to switch from tipping to not tipping without legislating it.

Never having a tipping culture is a much different thing than having to transition from one that tips to one that does not. Did Australia have tips then do away with them at some point? If so, how did they pull it off?

France used to have tips, which became a service fee, and is now transparent in the final price.

Interestingly waiters tend to ask Americans for tips in France, while they don’t expect anything from Europeans, that’s because American tourists tip when they travel there.

The solution is to stop tipping.

I didn’t know tipping was a thing before going to the US so no, that’s not true in the rest of the world.

And I’d argue that people who would complain about that here are people who don’t tip and save a bunch of bucks thanks to us suckers.

I think you're misunderstanding. It's not no-tips that's hard. It's no-tips when everyone else takes tips. Switching is the hard part.

Another case of "it's impossible to do, says the only western country not doing it".

It's been tried in multiple countries with success.

Then it needs to be mandated at a federal level. All people see is a difference in the advertised prices, while they likely would be paying the same on the final bill.