I stopped putting sugar in my tea back when I was a teenager in the seventies. Unfortunately about 2000 restaurants in South Texas started serving both unsweetened and sweetened tea. It may have been about the time the tea companies started supplying restaurtants with tea making machines and dispensers with their logos. Perhaps it's cheaper to make a big batch of sweetened tea than to put packets of sugar on each table and let each customer decide how much sugar to add. I find that presweetened tea has much more sugar than I ever used to put in. It's really complicated ordering tea, because sometimes waiters only hear "sweet" and not "unsweet". I not only can't stand to drink tea that sweet, but I also worry that the sweetener might be high fructose corn rather than sucrose from cane sugar.
I've seen more places offering "sweet tea" that is really flavored tea (like rasberry).
Ordering tea can be tricky depending on where you are. Best to bring some home brew, when you can.
Agreed that HFCS is not only bad for you, and doesn’t taste as good as sugar.
I prefer sweet tea with real sugar.
However, in restaurants that only sell unsweetened tea, I use Splenda, because it’s damn near impossible to dissolve sugar in ice cold tea.
I think the reason some places sell it presweetened is partially due to that - it’s difficult to get the sugar to dissolve once it’s cold.
I waited tables at a place that had a couple of tea machines. One for sweet and one for unsweet. They made about 5 gallons at a time and, yes, part of operating the sweet tea machine was making sure the corn syrup bag wasn’t empty. It automatically injected a certain amount of corn syrup into each batch that was brewed. My guess is that these machines are standard equipment in the restaurant industry.
BTW, I’m a southerner and prefer my tea unsweetened.