Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You Episode 3: The Store Manager Steals the Show

Three days after Episode 3 of Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You aired, the show's official channel posted its usual post-broadcast highlight clip, and the 23 comments underneath barely mentioned the two title characters — the most-liked reply, at 142 likes, wasn't about romance at all, it was about how bone-deep relatable working the night shift is.

From there the thread pivoted hard toward a side character nobody expected to become the main event: the store manager, who picked up a wave of "she's surprisingly girly" and "give me more of her" comments for a scene that was originally supposed to be about the two leads. By the end, one commenter had joked that the manga's real final chapter should be retitled from "the two of them" to "just one of them, alone," and another admitted, with a straight face, that a woman in her forties had never looked this endearing to them before.

Three days after Episode 3 aired, the show's official channel posted its usual post-broadcast highlight clip, a short cut captioned "It's fine, I already said so..." It's a quiet corner of the internet compared to this show's bigger uploads, and only a couple dozen comments showed up underneath, but almost none of the ones that did land were about the two title characters everyone assumes this show revolves around. Instead the thread split its attention between two things: how painfully relatable adult working life can be, and how one background character quietly walked off with the entire episode.

That sentiment set the tone almost immediately, and it didn't stay abstract for long. One of the top replies zeroed in on a much more specific, much less romantic kind of adult misery, and a couple more comments piled on right behind it.

• “Please, just be happy.”👍90⇄頼む、幸せになってくれ— @hi-bw3ej · 👍90
• “I'm a fortysomething smoker myself, and watching these two every week genuinely warms my heart.”👍7⇄喫煙者のアラフォーのおっさんですか、毎週2人のやりとりをみてほのぼのしております。— @かずやん-s1d · 👍7

But the real surprise star of the thread wasn't either lead. It was the store manager — a side character who's barely been more than background scenery until now — suddenly getting talked about like a main character in her own right, comment after comment.

• “The manager is swoon-worthy.”👍24⇄店長メロい— @Lana-wm5tk · 👍24
• “Honestly, I really like the manager's character too 😊”👍31⇄何気に店長さんのキャラも好きなんだよね😊— @ゆず胡椒-j9c · 👍31
• “Give me more of the manager.”👍9⇄店長もっとくれ— @CrowRacing0517 · 👍9

Once the manager-appreciation society got going, the shipping instincts kicked back in for the actual leads too, right on schedule, like nobody had ever left the topic in the first place.

A couple of people also flagged something worth knowing if you're reading the source manga alongside the show: this particular episode leans further into original material than usual.

And then, because this is still a comment section for a show literally named after two people smoking together, somebody had to go and imagine the worst-case ending.

Funny enough, that last line doubles as a decent summary of the whole thread: a bunch of grown adults, mildly surprised at their own feelings, rooting for two coworkers well past the usual anime-protagonist age — and, apparently, for the store manager standing just off to the side of them — to all just be happy already.