This protest did have a cost for them - they were fired.
Long story short, sometimes people try to use "expectation" to downplay bad behavior, and that's clearly irrelevant. The "expectation" for a business to do absolutely anything legal for profit is perhaps the most common manifestation of this fallacy.
Regardless, I was commenting on the ones who seem genuinely surprised that being fired was a possible outcome of their protests. It's as if that possibility never crossed their minds, which is itself surprising.