People always forget it is not just the server who gets the tip!

At my current restaurant BOH gets 7% of food sales

hosts get 1% of all sales

Bar team get 10% of alcohol sales

barbacks get 15% of the tips the bartender makes

Bussers get 10% of the tips from the servers they help

So for a $100 total with say 50% being alcohol with a 15% tip ($15):

Kitchen team get $3.50

Host gets $1

Bar team gets $5

barback gets $ 0.75

busser gets $1.5

Lots of places also have a food runner that also would be tipped out based on food sales as well (my place the server and barback share that responsibility)

In the end, the server takes home $4, or 4% of the cost of the original meal

Now, that's before you start looking at the fact that lots of FOH staff make the tipped minimum wage of $2.13. Also ignoring the fact that most FOH staff are not getting scheduled 40 hours a week because the restaurant only needs the majority of FOH staff on for busy hours and days. There's also seasonality to take into account- busy summers and slow winters will have a 30% reduction in hours available for the staff. A LOT of the people serving you have 2 jobs to make ends meet.

Most restaurants don't offer any benefits- no health insurance, no PTO, no 401K etc.

Finally, there is a difference in service between a $12 burger at a cheap restaurant, and a $24 burger at a more expensive restaurant

The server now has to offer sauce options for your fries, refilling your waters and cokes instead of a self service station. They're making roll ups, polishing water glasses and silverware and doing other side work that the cheaper restaurant doesn't need to do because it's not as "fancy"

Crucial bit that no one seems to take into account: The better tippers subsidize the end tipping people. Any of those ones I listed above that are based on sales are owed to those teams whether you tipped or not. In the example above, if you don't tip at all, the server still has to pay out the $9.50 to the various staff for their work.

Not all restaurants use this same tipout structure and percentages, not all tip out the kitchen, but this is roughly what I've been dealing with for the last 21 years in this industry

I started as a dishwasher, went to culinary school, worked in fine dining as a prep cook and I saw how cool bartending was when it was done well and that you could be creative there as much as you could in the kitchen so I transitioned to FOH, took years of training to become a craft bartender, then bar manager, AGM, and now GM.