This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** There are few annoyances worse than when a nice young man flips around a tiny virtual tablet that reads “add tip” after he did all the work of rotating his body 75 degrees to grab you an $18 beer from a fridge. It’s true: Tipping culture has gotten out of hand in the United States. I try to tip generously because I used to work as a delivery driver. I know the struggle of trying to scrape together some cash at the mercy of strangers who are tasked with making up the difference between the cost of living and your poverty base wage. That only applies to actual services, though: waiting, bartending, delivery, etc. There are plenty of cases (such as the stadium beer kiosk) where the expectation of tipping is wrongly bleeding Americans dry. And don’t get me started on communal tipping. I can’t think of anything more demoralizing than getting a fat tip due to your excellent service, only to be forced to pool it with the rest of your coworkers who didn’t do a thing to earn it. My disdain for this excess of American culture changed, though, when I recently took a trip to Ireland. In Ireland, like much of Europe, they don’t do tipping the way we do. You can tack on 5 to 10% for your waiter or bartender if the service is particularly good, but it’s not expected. And a service charge is often already included. You don’t get sideways looks for just paying the tab and leaving like you would stateside. My initial reaction to this was relief. Finally, some simplicity in this life. The meals may be a bit more expensive because the labor cost is factored into price, but simply being able to pay and go without doing extra math and giving a performance review at the end of the meal would be nice. Things began to change with each passing day. When we had our first sit-down dinner of the trip, I couldn’t help but notice how inattentive the waitstaff was. No refills of water. Twenty minutes passing by between being seated and having our order taken. Want to get some extra condiments on the side after the food arrives? Good luck. I thought it may be an anomaly, but then the same experience kept repeating itself every single time we had dinner during the trip. I will say this didn’t extend to bartending service — I’m talking strictly about sit-down meals here — but without a single exception, the service was just dreadful, inattentive, and slow. It was the type of experience that makes one pause and reflect on the bigger picture. I’m not saying that Europe’s poor table service is a direct consequence of a culture that stifles innovation and snuffs out the ambition of the individual for the good of the collective, but it is striking that we don’t have this issue in hyper-capitalist America. Now, you may be thinking this was my fault somehow. Maybe my Americanness was an affront to the waitstaff’s European sensibilities. I don’t think so. I wasn’t acting visibly foreign, and the staff were very polite and personable in every interaction. I gathered no sense of disdain whatsoever — only indifference. My only conclusion can be that these workers did not put an American-level effort in because they didn’t have to. There was no incentive to give me good service, so they didn’t. The system failed. The experience has certainly changed my perspective on tipping culture. Yes, it remains excessive in certain American contexts. But there’s a wisdom to Chesterton’s fence: If something has been around a while, it just might serve a purpose you’ll miss when it’s gone.