Recently, the owner of the factory my grandfather worked for the last 30 years has retired and sold their business, as a single package, fully operational, with

Recently, the owner of the factory my grandfather worked for the last 30 years has retired and sold their business, as a single package, fully operational, with employees and pending orders. It was still shut down and all employees were let go without any severance. From what I know, this is the norm for retirement sales, not the exception. In this thought experiment, the result would be very similar to what happened, except with less wealth concentration, and with fewer Boeing-McDonnell Douglas mergers that ruin good companies in pursuit of short term profits (because short term profits are harder to realize by design). Lost jobs are also a lot less of a problem in countries with functioning safety net.