You don't have to tell me. My first career was in banking right out of college. I went through 3 buyouts where all the bigger banks wanted was the deposit base. They promptly fired all the redundancy and overhead and many people lost jobs each time. It is what it is. In the end those smaller banks probably wouldn't have made it anyway. In fact, they were probably created with the sole intention of being bought one day and making a lot of money for the board/large shareholders.
This line of attack from Perry and Newt was just dumb. Bain may not be all puppy dogs and sunshine, but it is largely a necessary part of capitalism. Many large companies exist today which employ a lot of people because of Bain and venture capital firms like it. This whole attack put conservatives like Rush, Hannity, Levin, etc, in a position of defending capitalism itself and associating it with none other than RINO Mitt. These attacks were exactly what Romney needed in a GOP primary and the end result is probably a big net positive for Romney who is the least conservative candidate in the field. Just dumb.
In my case it was industrial but its essentially the same thing.
The board of directors looked at the company and saw that we were profitable but not in a huge way and compared it with a scenario of buying us out and shipping the work off to another one of their companies. The buy and close option was the more profitable option so it went to a vote among stockholders and that was all she wrote.
In fact they worked us hard for about a year while increasing the number of employees and cutting nearly everyone back to part time as a means of getting rid of employees cheaply.