It's definitely not like that in all restaurants - as a dishwasher at a restaurant I never got pooled tips. Some places do it, some don't. This whole "we'll d

It's definitely not like that in all restaurants - as a dishwasher at a restaurant I never got pooled tips. Some places do it, some don't. This whole "we'll deprioritize your drinks if you don't give me a lot of money" is just... INSANE. It's really bizarre. "He may have earned their slow down, so why should you reward him?" You have no way of knowing why in the first place. And giving him a penny ensures that if this sort of blackmail is going on, this server has now even less leverage in order to try to buy decent service from coworkers. The restaurant owners that let this go on get hurt too. I don't particularly care if my service was bad because the cook was slow because he wasn't getting tipped enough to warrant cooking my food the way I asked for it. I don't care if the service was bad because the server wasn't able to curry favor with the bar staff. I just care the service was shitty, and I won't be back. Even less money for the bar staff, cooks, dishwashers and ultimately owners. In tipping restaurants, the incentive is still for turnover as fast as possible. The extra $5 they might get from me is less overall than the extra $30 they'll get from packing in 3 more tables that night. And if everyone is sharing tips, they all have even more incentive for faster turnover, regardless of my happiness. EDIT: if restaurants were transparent with everything up front - detailing where tips go, showing me a scoreboard of which servers had favor with bar staff and line cooks, and let me choose the 'best' staff, great. I don't get any of that advantage. I get a random server who may just have pissed someone off last week, and nothing I can do about it.