Since Emmitt J. Culligan began his water softener firm in 1924 in Saint Paul, Minnesota-, the company had suffered through long and expensive lawsuits and through the Great Depression, when no one wanted the two-hundred-to-four-hundreddollar softener apparatus. The distraught entrepreneur took a-job with National Aluminate Corporation in Illinois: There he found an answer to the problem of high cost: do not sell the softener'j-selLthe service. When Culligan started his new, setvice- oriented business in 1936, he installed the water softening machines at no cost to customers who paid two dollars a month as a user fee. Under a "no deposit, no obligation" arrangement, customers could cancel the service at any time. By 1938 he started to franchise outside Illinois, and within ten years the Culligan dealer network serviced six hundred thousand subscribers at an aver-, age monthly fee of $2.75 to $3.00.

The 1950s brought another...