(I delivered untargeted physical spam in my early teens, a TV guide)

Why you think the person who's delivering doesn't have an incentive to listen?

They're paid to deliver to N addresses, if they know that X, Y, Z addresses don't want the delivery they're still getting paid for N deliveries.

When I did this job looooong ago I'd get a stack of papers, along with a strike-though list of addresses that shouldn't be delivered to, as those people had contacted the publisher.

But over the course of doing this job for a summer or two I'd also have people instead ask me to stop delivering in person, which I could use to overlay my own strike-though list at the beginning.

Those were much better, as unlike the first list they didn't subtract from the N, free money!

Clearly that didn't work for the GP for whatever reason, but I think it should in general. Then again this was a different time, and not even the same continent, YMMV.

I think both you and the comment above you are assuming that the person on the other side of the phone isn't an ass. If they are, they're likely to make up things about renters and they're likely to be abusive to the person doing the deliveries.

I usually try to charitable when interpreting other people's actions, but... There's always a possibility that someone's just mean.

They aren't told to deliver to any specific addresses. This is 100% why they can't actually comply with a request not to deliver. The guy in the truck doesn't have some list of addresses and has no time or capacity to be consulting any such list even if he had one. He has a route and the route is whole streets, and probably has to cover many whole streets every day, and probably gets paid almost nothing for it, and so probably goes to some other job after that every day. Some individual exceptions like remember this house and that house is probably utterly impossible.

Their unworkable business model shouldn't be my problem so I'm not excusing them, just saying what the realities probably are.

In the scenario I described you'll need to consult or maintain such a list anyway.

This'll differ by jurastiction, but in most of Europe you're allowed to deliver unrequested advertisements by post, but you're obligated to stop when asked.

I'm saying that in my case the paper boy was incentivised to oblige, but not inform the head office.

> Some individual exceptions like remember this house and that house is probably utterly impossible.

Most people (even the uneducated, or otherwise considered dumb) can remember and sing along to the lyrics of hundreds of songs, and remember the location of hundreds or even thousands of items kept in their house.

So even if you're delivering to hundreds of addresses you'll quickly start to remember the exceptions, at least that was my experience.

You are forgiven for taking this with salt, but I swear I did not open the dialog outwardly as annoyed as I was inwardly.

I picked up the paper and tried to give it back (not by throwing it at him I swear). I live one house from the end of a dead end, and so he has to stop and back up or turn around so I approached the driver side while he was stopped.

I won't say I stayed perfectly bland and pleasant by the end but I didn't come out swinging or yelling. I never did more than just say "I don't want this" though.

I chalked it up to they probably just have a hard life with far more and worse stresses and worries than I. I actually feel bad for them having to do that job.