These people who are mad at Starbucks were mostly hired by Starbucks to publicly "attack" them, which fits in nicely to the "war on Christmas" narrative. People are attracted to the controversy and Starbucks gets tons of exposure.

It's similar to native advertising. Native advertising focuses on buying upvotes and planting comments and upvotes to make certain narratives look popular, which is frequent on reddit. But because people are naturally attracted to controversy, the story gets repeated everywhere, so they don't even have to buy upvotes. It's like sex, it sells. People are naturally drawn to it through some primal instincts, and they use that knowledge to draw people's attention to their product. The Starbucks "controversy" is on reddit, it's on facebook, people I know mentioned it in person.

The controversy is the commodity they use to attract viewers, but the controversy is largely falsely generated by Starbucks to attract attention. Most of the people being outraged come after the original falsified outrage paid for by starbucks has been aired on fox news or whatever. They hire a company to find these vocal christian loons and stir them up about this particular story and then give them an audience by allowing them to speak on tv about this particular issue. This fuels the controversy which drives views. It makes it look like there's a bunch of people who are seriously outraged about this thing, even though there might only be 5 in total and they're being handed microphones and given interviews left and right.

Most importantly, this type of "advertising through controversy" generates organic views (and organic community-driven upvotes and comments) from places like reddit who are amazed that the controversy exists in the first place and upvote it to mock those people fighting starbucks (who don't really exist in any large numbers in the first place). So "everyone" is laughing at "everyone" being pissed at a company, and meanwhile everyone is repeating "Starbucks" over and over and talking about their cup designs. It's advertising. People need to get real.

There are so many distracted ignorant people who are wasting so much time on simulated controversy and it's one big reason why our culture, society, and government are crumbling. They think they are looking at something that matters, but is in actuality completely unimportant. This is the circus of the modern day. These "organic" controversies, that are, in reality, largely advertising and distractions. You see this pattern everywhere once you start looking for it.