>You so desperately want this to be a nefarious PR job.
And you seem to desperately want me to be some bitter chick-fil-a hater. IF chick-fil-a was involved in the writing of this piece then it's nothing more than what hundreds of other companies do everyday, PR involvement is an integral part of the modern press. I may not like it but I would not call it "nefarious". I'm not commenting because I have a hate-on for chick-fil-a but because there seems to be a lot of wilful ignorance here on just how much the media we consume is manipulated by PR.
On to your points:
1. I don't really see why chick-fil-a would get more pageviews than another restaurant so I'll skip this.
2. Of course the writer wants an effective opening, but the "you're part of a pay-it-forward line" fantasy could have easily been written at a generic restaurant.
3. Other people have said it but chick-fil-a is closed on sundays. Also I don't really get what this has to do with how and why the author wrote the story.
4. I'm pretty sure a fluff piece on people paying for each other's fast food didn't take a month to write. And I think the author probably did discover the phenomenon after a chick-fil-a related conversation, one with a chick-fil-a sponsored PR representative.
5. It's impossible to say assuredly whether any article was PR influenced but that quote seemed awfully convenient.
6. You seem to be very concerned with christianity when no-one else has mentioned it, least of all the article. I would not personally assume that chick-fil-a patrons are particularly christian, it seems strange to me that this is immediately the thing you jump to. Same thing goes with the source's political leanings, I don't consider fast food to be a political matter and I don't think NYT or chick-fil-a do either.
7. Sure, but if that's the case it's interesting that most of the other restaurants mentioned are coffee shops and a bagel cafe (which aren't really chick-fil-a competitiors) rather than popeyes or mary brown's.
so in conclusion:
1. I'm right
2. You seem to weirdly have tied up a fast-food restaurant into some christian right wing identity you hold and it's preventing you from acknowledging the very really possibility of PR manipulation in an NYT fluff piece.