I lived in Japan 14 years. Most places, the service is great and NO TIPPING is expected or even accepted. You make exceptions only for those rare circumstances like when my little girl threw up in the back of a taxicab . . . only fair to give the guy an extra $20 or so for inconvenience and cleaning.
Yeah, meals are more expensive there. So is most everything else. But if you calculate the cost of meals based on your earnings, it is actually more expensive to eat at a restaurant in the U.S.A. than the equivalent in Japan even BEFORE you add the tip.
Where I work, we don't pay our workers such niggardly wages that we expect our vendors or customers to give tips as a cost of doing business. Why does the restaurant industry expect such special treatment?
I am sure Applebee’s menus show that the 18% tip is added for parties over X. It’s done that way at almost all US restaurants.
In Europe the automatic tip (15% IIRC) is on every bill. A guest can then leave a gratuity if they choose. That causes problems when Europeans first eat at US restaurants and assume the tip was included in their bill. It works more favorably for European waiters.
The restaurant industry and the hospitality industry generally operate at incredibly tight profit margins vs most businesses. It’s one reason so many restaurants go out of business in short order (so to speak).
If a restaurant schedules, say, 10 waiters for a shift at the higher hourly wage, but has only enough customers to fill 5 tables, they’d lose money on that shift, and soon be out of business. If they understaff for a shift, customers get poor service and won’t return. As it is the waiters share the risk against their own ‘profit’ in the form of tips.