Tipping practice: good or bad?

reflection on BBC article: "To tip or not to tip... or should it be banned?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22846846

Tipping should be banned altogether. As a Canadian I was told tipping should base on service quality at around 10%. When living in US, I saw tips inflate through the years. From 10~15% to 15% minimum. Some restaurants (not even high class) even charge 18% automatically when you have a party of 4+ (and they still gave me false information and messed up my order). Plus this has nothing to do with the level of service you receive.

On top of that, waiters can get very rude when they think you don't tip enough. Some restaurants even add tips in automatically (15% or more) when they think you're foreigners. Some of my American friends told me that you can tip less if you pay by credit cards but tip in cash. In my opinion, I think the restaurant industry secretly gang up on promoting higher tips, nothing short of bribing travel guide authors to ask people to tip higher. It's just a gigantic messy system that can be discriminating at times. Just factor in higher wages into food prices and save us all the trouble!

By the way, IRS say you only need to report tips income at a rate around 8% on food prices. So...um....half of tips income are tax-free?