Killing it in places with a strong tipping culture seems thorny, though. A restaurant that charges high enough prices to pay its servers well without tips is presumably going to have trouble attracting customers. Even if they say there's no need to tip, that's factored into the price, the psychological heuristics that people use around economic decisions like this are well-known to be irrational and generally crap.
And if servers' actual pay is increased enough to make up for not making tips, I'm guessing that back-of-the-house staff will start demanding higher pay, too, because the unfairness of the pay disparity would be a lot more apparent if servers and bartenders got better overall pay and known, stable, transparent pay.
And I'm guessing there are other problems that come into play that I don't even know about, since I haven't worked in a restaurant since I was a kid. But I'm guessing it all boils down to something akin to how car dealerships that price transparently can't make it, even though basically every consumer ostensibly wishes that car dealerships would price transparently, because it's too difficult to get your customer base to actually grok how this works when presented with it as a real option.
Again, restaurants can only get away with paying the wages they do because of tips. If tips disappeared overnight I'd hope that vast majority of waiters and drivers would just leave as it doesn't make any sense any more. It works like this in literally every other industry, yet Americans always explain this as if restaurants are some super special snowflake industry where this cannot possibly work. I'm yet to see a reason why it wouldn't.
I'm not saying it's impossible, so much as I'm suggesting that the people who have the greatest ability to make the change (restaurant owners) have more reasons not to change it than they do reasons to change it.
