Bartenders and Servers can be making anywhere from $40-60 an hour in a lot of places and wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more than that in the right gig.

I don't think you realize how unpopular disrupting that would be cause a fuckton of people are not going to deal with it if you have to work 40 hours a week to gross about $40,000/year.

This is irrelevant to the incident at hand. It's ok to have objections to the economics of service industry wages and tipping but it's not an excuse to be a shitty tipper or a non-tipper. The social contract is that when you walk into a bar or restaurant, you've agreed to participate in that system.