Businesses spend millions saying how friendly they are, then turn around and treat us as adversaries, Marc Fisher says.

WASHINGTON – It makes no sense, but when a huge, faceless corporation rejects you, it still hurts.

Best Buy, the electronics chain, is moving to get rid of the 20 percent of its customers who are least desirable. These are the people who snap up heavily discounted sale items and then sell them for a quick profit on eBay or scout out the lowest prices on the Web and then force Best Buy to fulfill its promise to meet any price. The Wall Street Journal reports that this sort of customer culling is coming to a store near you, as businesses search for ways to eliminate drains on the bottom line.

I haven’t been disinvited from Best Buy yet, though it’s hard to tell, given that it is one of those stores that treat all customers as criminals, requiring everything but a strip search before they let you leave the building. But I did get a taste of the new antagonism toward consumers recently, when my car insurance company dumped us because we had actually dared to use our policy, filing claims when my wife got hit by a deer and when she banged into a pole in a parking garage. When the letter came kicking us out, we were incensed. Rejection is rejection, even if it’s generated by a computer program.

So when you venture into the consumer jungle this holiday weekend, go knowing that the same businesses that woo us with sales and glitzy advertising are increasingly willing and eager to dump or even sue us.

The movie industry is following the path paved by the music business, filing hundreds of lawsuits against consumers who enjoy their products so much that they want to share them with friends. Instead of adapting to the new rules of the road, these companies wield a legal sledgehammer to bash their best potential customers. (Interestingly, book publishers don’t sue public libraries. They learned long ago that their challenge was to make the paid product more attractive and convenient than the free one.)

“Suing your customers is not a winning business strategy,” writes G. Richard Shell, a legal studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. He notes that a century ago, when Henry Ford started selling cheap cars off his revolutionary assembly line, the country’s leading carmakers responded by suing hundreds of customers who bought the Ford product. The suits claimed that buying a Ford violated a patent that the other automakers had on internal combustion engines.

For eight years, the big companies sued Ford and his customers. By the end of the war, Ford had won in court and, far more important, in the hearts and wallets of the public. Ford became the country’s top carmaker.

Why don’t the music and movie industries understand that lesson? In a society in which lawyers hold the upper hand, the resort to the courts is almost automatic. But the suits are aimed not only at those who get hauled to court.

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argues that the suits are meant to stigmatize downloading for all of us.

“The lawsuits are about spreading the idea that downloading is wrong and illegal, not about inflicting the maximum possible punitive damage,” Cowen says. “Think of the lawsuits as one way to buy space in the newspaper but without paying advertising rates. And the company gets the journalists – a more credible outside source – to be the ones reporting that downloading is illegal.”

The music and movie industries are desperately afraid of falling into the trap in which the print media find themselves. Newspapers and magazines embraced the Internet, teaching a generation of consumers that content is and should be free. Now that millions of people believe in free content, the print media face the daunting challenge of declining circulation.

It’s just as easy to trade music and movies freely on the Web as it is to find articles and books. The campaign against downloading is destined to fail because the technology for trading free media will only get easier to use.

But the lawsuits are popping, and the same businesses that spend millions to tell us how friendly and caring they are turn around and subject us to voice-mail jails, customer culling and front-door security more invasive than that at a high school in a rough neighborhood.

It’s not enough to be a consumer anymore. You have to be a desirable consumer. I’d rather stay home and eat pumpkin pie. Happy shopping, fellow turkeys.