I've worked at a restaurant for years, same with my friends. Good servers know how to not be too pushy. You greet them when they sit down, ask for drinks. You d

I've worked at a restaurant for years, same with my friends. Good servers know how to not be too pushy. You greet them when they sit down, ask for drinks. You drop off drinks, take an order for appetizers. When you drop off appetizers, you take their food order and look around to check to see if anyone needs refills. You come back with refills, and then bring over the food when it's done. You walk past the table to check if there is any empty dishes to grab, and ask if they need anything else when you do. Basically, my point is every trip that you need to make anyways, you check the table. If a table is hanging for too long, you start to get a little more pushy, because it's a business that's trying to make money. If it's a busy Saturday night and you have a table that doesn't want to leave, other people have to wait longer for that table, and also the restaurant makes less money. Imagine your annoyance if you make a reservation at a restaurant, and you get sat late because people are taking 3 hours to finish up. Your point about obligatory tipping and not being able to penalize servers doesn't make any sense. If service is that bad, you just don't tip. If a server yells at you, you talk to the manager or just walk out the door. I've put zero for a tip a few times and no one has given me a hard time, and if they do, your night was already ruined by awful service anyways. Also, if you make it out the door in time, the servers won't even see your check by the time you're gone. If you can't bring yourself not to tip someone, that's on you. It happens ALL THE TIME. Almost every other night a server will tell me that so and so didn't tip, or tipped a dollar, etc. By the way, none of this is for or against tipping, I'm just explaining my thoughts on the current system.