Tipping

One of my pet peeves is tipping. Or rather, the idea that tipping is mandatory, and that bad tippers are inherently crappy people. When did the idea that you tipped for good service, and tipped well for exceptional service go off the rails?? Now we tip for just about everything.
What brought the idea about was a trip out for dinner. A couple of friends and I headed into Kanata and went out for dinner at a certain establishment. The food was okay, and the service, which started out fine, because there was no one else in the place, slowly deteriorated to the point where we saw our server once every hour. In the end, he gave us our bills, and we waited 20 minutes for him to come back and collect our money. Actually, to be more accurate, we waited 15 minutes, and then got the hell out of there, because if a server can't be bothered to come back and collect his money, then he's seriously shite.
But we all tipped. Not exceptionally, but there was a tip. I would call it poor to mediocre service, something which should result in ZERO tip, or a very small one. But there is this expectation that because the server has a shitty job, and the owner doesn't want to pay him/her well, the customer has to make up the slack. I guarantee you if we had walked out of there without tipping, the first though in Buddy's mind would be "those guys are assholes" not "wow, I really half-assed it out there tonight, I better pull my socks up for tomorrow night."
And which one of those two makes more sense?
It's just a job like any other job. You don't tip an airline counter attendant for sticking your baggage on the conveyor belt quickly. It's her job. You don't tip a cashier at the grocery store for scanning your groceries and packing them effectively. So seriously, what the hell is the deal? I'm not going to say I'm going to stop tipping, but in certain cases, it will be severely curtailed.