Yes, I have both been a server, and regularly spend time with people who still work as servers. My whole point is that we did benefit from it, by making much fatter paychecks than we would otherwise.

My price discrimination comment was admittedly unclear, since I tangled up two chains of reasoning. Restaurants make some amount of money from customers. Some of that money goes to the owners, some of that goes to labor. Price discrimination schemes (i.e., charging people willing to pay more, more, and people willing to pay less, less), by their nature, extract more money from customers. So restaurants with price discrimination schemes have more money total to split between labor and the owners.

Thus, we'd expect that labor makes more money at a restaurant with a price discrimination scheme than at one with flat pricing.

Culturally expected tipping is a specific price discrimination scheme, that has the cultural and legal rules to disproportionately benefit the labor. Other price discrimination schemes lack these rules, so we'd expect some of the excess value extracted from customers to be taken by the owners, rather than labor.

Thus, Labor at restaurants with tipping get paid more than labor at restaurants with other price discrimination schemes, which get paid more than labor at restaurants with flat rate pricing.

Tipping culture is not an exploitation of the servers. If you're morally opposed to (even voluntary) price discrimination, you might be able to frame it as being exploitative against the customers. But of all the ways to structure a restaurant, tipping is one of the most effective at inflating servers' pay checks, which I struggle to imagine how you can frame as exploiting said servers.

Doesn't it ever happen that tipped staff end up having a "shitty" shift (say hours of the day where fewer customers are here) and end up working for nothing? I have heard that, it doesn't sound like a "much fatter paycheck".

Or would you say that all tipped staff makes much fatter paychecks?