One of my stranger experiences as a cashier was watching someone waiting to be checked out change their mind and start trying to abandon some ground beef among the candy bars at the checkout. Apparently handing it over to me didn’t occur to them. At least when I pointedly offered, “If you don’t want that I’ll take it.” they handed it over.
Given the state of data harvesting I imagine purchasing a list of phone numbers associated with a given demographic is trivial.