Corporations: When It Rains, It Shines

The table salt shaker gets only 4% of the 13 million tons of salt produced in the U.S. each year. The rest goes into a vast variety of products: pickles and ice cream, lipstick and dyes, catchup and candy, cattle feed and air conditioners, plastics and newspapers. The world's biggest producer of salt—and the source of nearly a third of the salt used for all purposes in the U.S.—is Chicago's Morton Salt Co., which is known to most Americans through its motto, "When it rains, it pours."

The motto seems to apply to the company as well as to its...