Your experience seems to be wrong. In controlled experiments, the quality of service increases when tipping is banned, assuming the employee can expect a decent wage.
There are some fairly entertaining podcasts which will give you a rundown of several decades of research into this topic[1][2].
In your examples, you are certainly a sample size of one, and there are too many variables. The culture of the US, where tipping is the norm, is not much like any country where tipping is never expected.