I usually try to charitable when interpreting other people's actions, but... There's always a possibility that someone's just mean.
Their unworkable business model shouldn't be my problem so I'm not excusing them, just saying what the realities probably are.
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.
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.