Just from the perspective of the poor mugs who deliver the free local newspapers......
I worked for a courier company that had a contract to deliver the local newspaper. The areas were divided into Runs and the printer knew exactly how many papers had to be delivered in each Run. We were not supposed to deliver from a moving vehicle....we had to walk the route and put the paper either in the letterbox or on the ground beside the letterbox. In unit blocks we had to leave a pile of papers under the letterboxes....there was a certain ratio of papers to units but I have forgotten what it was now.
If there were complaints from the residents they were passed on to the company doing the deliveries and had to be addressed under pain of losing the contract. And you definitely could not get away with dumping any undelivered papers...that was grounds for instant dismissal. I any residents did not want the paper we had to tell them to ring the newspaper office and go through all the fuss and bother of getting themselves on a list so the delivery person was not accused of failing to deliver.
I used to tell them to accept the paper and then dump it and most of them were happy to do so.
