ASK most Americans to describe their worst nightmare and you'll most likely get a wild-eyed rant about bird flu wiping out Wall Street or a terrorist bomb threat at the local hardware store.

But were they to ignore the visions of apocalypse dancing in their heads for just long enough to think about what really affects them on a day-to-day basis . . . well, they'd probably say something about bad service.

We Yanks pride ourselves on being discerning customers, wielding our buying power like the mighty weapon we know it to be.

If an American walks into a store and is treated rudely, he doesn't just choose to patronise a different establishment in future.

He goes out of his way to tell all his friends and the next three to five strangers he meets to boycott the place.

He writes a letter to the local paper, rants about the ordeal on national public radio until the DJ cuts him off and tells the story at parties and church functions for years to come. In a masterstroke of consumerism, one snubbed American can transform into a whirlwind of bad publicity.

The worst thing imaginable -- for any self-respecting American at least -- isn't when a business thinks it can afford to ignore its customers, but when customers allow themselves to be ignored.

I'm talking now about the audacity of the organisations responsible for the railway network in this country, having raised prices yet again despite ever-shameful standards of service.

And yet, on days when it takes me more than three hours to travel from Blackburn to Colne, with delays and mechanical faults leaving dozens of people like myself out in the cold, I'm the only one who seems to take offence.

To Americans, complaining is nothing short of a constitutional right -- one of the few things we're passionate about that won't affect our cholesterol levels. But my fellow passengers seem happy enough to shrug their shoulders and shell out more money for rumoured "improvements" that they know in their hearts the North West is guaranteed never to see.

Public transport might be a little harder to boycott than your average retail outlet -- some of us don't have much of a choice. But at the end of the day it's a business, and one that could do with hearing the F-word a lot more often.

"Feedback" that is.