Since competition tends to eliminate profits, and since the profits of any particular enterpriser are likely to come from a relatively large number of individuals, the saving to any one individual by the elimination of the enterpriser is usually small. As a consequence, cooperation is ordinarily possible only by people who are willing to exert themselves in order to effect petty savings. Generations of self-denial have accustomed the working classes of England to give careful attention to their purchases of food and clothing. In this country, on the contrary, we have always looked on petty savings as something akin to parsimony, and hence to be carefully avoided. Here we have the reason for their general failure in this country. The typical American housewife, even among the ranks of unskilled labor, has not yet learned the difference between nine cents and ten cents, though this difference if spread out over the average family expenditures of this group for a year would aggregate forty or fifty dollars. Cooperation is also likely to be hampered in those localities or countries in which enterprisers are especially skilled. The European retailer is compelled to get excessive profits to cover losses caused by his slow-paying customers of the upper classes. Here such compulsion is neither necessary nor justifiable; merchants do not strive for certain customers, as they are likely to do in Europe, in order to gain respectability. Occasionally cooperation is undertaken to break a monopolistic hold on some industry. Fruit-growers, for example, have found it necessary in some sections of the country to market their own products in order to keep from being literally robbed.