"It varies from branch to branch, but research shows that more than 80 percent of (Norwegians) don't complain when they're dissatisified with something," Bård Tronvoll, a lecturer at the College of Hedmark, told newspaper Aftenposten.

That's too bad, Tronvoll maintains, because complaints can be positive. "By making it easy for customers to complain, companies can learn what's wrong and use the opportunity to make it right," said Tronvoll, who holds a doctorate degree in the subject of service.

Foreigners in Norway may tend to agree with Tronvoll. While Norwegians often accuse each other of complaining and never being satisfied -- here's even an expression for it, en kulture of sutring (a culture of whining) -- outsiders often have a different impression.

Many of Aftenposten's non-Norwegian readers, for example, have sent in comments over the years, bemoaning "Norwegian passivity." Norwegians, they claim, merely accept everything from the country's high prices, to the varying quality of produce in the market to the huge role the state plays in many aspects of human life.

"Sometimes I want to want to scream to my fellow shoppers in the grocery store, 'why do you put up with this??'" wrote one immigrant from the US who had moved to a town on Norway's southern coast a few years ago and was still reeling from the effects of sticker shock combined with a limited variety of goods on offer and poor, often unfriendly, service at the cash register.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, after all, and honest feedback from customers can boost business, Tronvoll believes.

"If customers don't have a means of effectively complaining, they'll simply be dissatisfied and have a poor impression of the business," he said. "And they'll pass on that impression to others."

A recent survey conducted by research firm Synovate for an organization that promotes higher levels of service, HSMAI, found that the retail and travel branches scored slightly higher than the bank and indsurance branch and much higher than public services and the high tech/telecoms branches. But none of them scored much better than average.

"That's not good enough, and there's no excuse for it," said Per Morten Hoff, secretary general of the information technology association IKT-Norge.

As Ingunn Hofseth of HSMAI put it: "Complaints aren't a problem, it's how they're handled," she said. "And here in Norway, we have a lot to learn."