At least to a level that isn’t actively dangerous to the water pipes of the houses it enters? Maybe even to a level where it doesn’t ruin every water-using appliance in the house? Why does every single person in the Great Lakes area need to own their own individual water softener, if we have city water? I can understand that well users need them, why should everyone else?
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Simple answer is efficiency, and money. For starters, the water meets legal levels of hardness/softness, so “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” applies (even if those standards seem to be wrong to the end users).
Even if that weren’t a factor, though. The cost of softening the water at the supplier level would cost more than what the end users would want to be billed for. Bot just for the equipment and consumables, but the extra man-hours that would be needed to maintain that equipment.
It’s always going to come down to cost. Just look at the setup you have at your home to soften the water for the very little amount of water you use. Now scale that up to a level that will provide all of the water needed for everybody they supply water to. They would need a separate facility just for that purpose and running that facility would cost a lot of money. That cost would be reflective in your water bill.
It’s simply cheaper and easier for you to do it yourself.
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Hard water is beneficial to metal pipes. Hard water will create a layer of minerals inside that will protect from corrosion. Municipal water pipes will rust and break from the outside before the inside builds enough deposits to significantly effect flow.
Soft water is corrosive to metal pipes. It leeches the metal and minerals trying to stabilize itself.
There are two answers here that are part of the answer and another answer I haven’t seen yet that is the biggest reason. That reason is that the companies don’t “ship” you hard water. Or rather, even if they did soften it, it would be hard by the time it got to you. This is because (as one answer pointed out) the water will leach metal out of the pipes in order to balance itself. Buy piping hard water, you prevent that corrosion. This will also make maintenance significantly cheaper, as well as making the pipes safer. Look at Flint, Michigan for an example of what improperly treated water will do to your plumbing system. The state replaced the source of the water and didn’t fix the chemicals in it, so lead leeched out. Quite honestly this is the most expensive part, simply the softening of the water is probably not prohibitively expensive, but the maintenance would be.
I’m not sure where you are in the Great Lakes but in our area we get our water from Lake Huron.
It’s not very common for houses to have a water softener with city water.
However if you have a well then you need a water softener.
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