I found it a bit unusual.
It is endemic in the US for two reasons.
1. It allows businesses to hide true costs.
2. If workers do not declare their cash tips, it lets businesses pay less in payroll taxes.
It has nothing to do with whether or not you see the person. In fact, that's a major problem - in restaurants, the person who busts her a## to prepare your food doesn't get tipped, but the person who carries it to your table does.
I find it objectionable. I prohibited our cleaners from putting tip envelopes in our rental and told the management that they should tell me how much they want to make for a cleaning, wages and tips, and that is what I will give them and they can pass that on to the actual cleaners. They told me they don't have a good system for distributing that to individual cleaners (i.e. giving them a bonus for cleaning my place vs places that allow tip envelopes) and, now that I do 90%+ of cleanings myself, they just have the owner do my cleanings (and yes, I pay a fair bit more per cleaning than others, which I am happy to do in order to not annoy my guests).
The whole thing infuriates me. When I am king of the world, there will be laws against tipping being part of someone's base sustenance. In French it is "pourboire" and in German "Trinkgeld" which indicates it should be a little bit of money to buy a beer after work, not how people pay the rent.
Experiments in non-tipped restaurants in the US have mostly failed and the pandemic resulted in seeing tip jars and tip notes in places they had never been seen before.
I've worked in both tipped jobs and in a job that would normally be tipped work but where tips were prohibited (as a ranger in a national park) and I far far far prefer not working for tips. I find it negatively impacts my relations with the customer.
