complaints and Bermuda's problems with treatment visitors receive in hotels and restaurants. According to the article, a charge card organisation has been carrying out a study of why some restaurants succeed and some fail. The study was provoked by over 4,000 restaurant closures in the United States last year.

This country as a whole is a service industry making its living from the pleasure visitors derive from a visit to the best of the islands, Bermuda.

Some of the complaints restaurant patrons in the survey have are about other patrons. The most annoying thing you can do to your fellow diners is to be loud, vulgar or just plain annoying. You can also get other diners very upset by stealing the silver or other table-top items.

If restaurant owners are going to give their patrons anything, they are not too keen on free services but they do appreciate a free appetiser at the beginning of the meal.

Much of the problem with restaurants seems to have to do with service.

Among the things patrons find most annoying is for a server to refuse to put orders on separate checks; a server who is unfamiliar with the menu or a server who rattles off a long list of specials without prices. Patrons think the latter is an attempt to charge them higher prices.

According to the survey, most restaurant patrons make no complaint about poor service at the time, they simply never return to the restaurant and tell their friends and relatives that the service was poor. People who run restaurants wish that customers would complain to management so that they can confront the server with poor service but few patrons do so. Some patrons do protest poor service when it comes to the tip, thus small tips often reflect not parsimony but displeasure. Thus, very often, servers complain about the tip when, in fact, it reflects lack of service by the restaurant. That is often not the server's fault because the server's ability to serve properly can be affected by other things in the restaurant, like meal preparation and the equipment provided.

The survey showed that most restaurant patrons tip 15 to 19 percent and only a very few tip less than 10 percent.

It is very interesting for Bermuda with its automatic gratuity system that the thing restaurant patrons in the United States disliked most was an automatic gratuity on the bill.

The importance of the survey to Bermuda is that it indicates areas of unhappiness and the object of any service industry is to keep the customers happy. It seems that unhappy customers seldom complain but they do go home and tell their friends and relatives about the problems.