I'm American, hate the system... and work in restaurant management, so I can see both sides of it. YES, we should just pay servers what their job is worth. But if we did that, we'd have to raise our food and drink prices by 15% to 20% -- so an $11 burger would become a $13 burger, a $5 beer would become a $6 beer -- and nobody would pay it. It's an annoying system, but there's no good way out of it.

Though you do see a lot of restaurants adding an "automatic gratuity," usually 20%, to large tables.