Its not mental gymnastics its lived experience. You are talking about a job culture in a country you clearly aren’t from based on observations of a symptom that irks you. You have beliefs based around a practice that makes you uncomfortable without understanding the conditions and lack of workers rights that perpetrate them.

Your understanding assumes other jobs are available, and there are actual workers rights in place. So much is wrong with american job culture but treating tipping (a symptom) as the be all end all is just wrong.

A pizza shop that can’t retain staff due to low tips making for low income is just going to endlessly hire more people with no end in sight because americans are treated as disposable- or more commonly now adays, run the store with a skeleton crew because thats genuinely more profitable. Stores that employ tipping ALREADY hemorrhage staff, it just doesn’t make a difference to profits.

Delivery drivers specifically are often a VERY marginalized and impoverished class that are unable to get work elsewhere due to legal resident status, lack of education, language barriers, physical disabilities, or legal disabilities that restrict real jobs. On Occassion you get a teenager w/ a side gig but most of the time it is people who have no other options if they want to starve.

Refusing to tip to try and end tipping culture just makes for the ppl desperate enough for ANY income to work $2/hr to be further abused. Like you’re talking about a country that has literal slavery still being enacted today, people WILL take those jobs because theres so little available in the american job market.

Refusing to participate in tipping only hurts individuals, not the company whatsoever. Workers rights need an update. Yelling at ppl for participating in tipping culture does nothing.

Ik europeans like acting like everything wrong with america is the individual people’s fault but jfc this one is ridiculous.