There's something called saturation mailing. They can pay the post office to basically send a catalog to every residential address in a zip code. In fact that's one of the ways in which USPS supports itself now.
I also get a lot of shit due to bugmen who lived at my place before me probably just giving their info to anyone who asks. If it's in their name I can return it as wrong address and that usually stops the catalogs from that company, but most of them are smart enough to say "current resident".
It's mostly catalogs for stores I would never go to because there's closer ones that everybody uses that are a million times better. Why do they bother collecting all this info if they still utterly fail to deliver me any relevant marketing? Maybe the real meta here is to figure out the least targeted demographic and do everything you can to pass as that.
