While working any customer-facing job, it’s likely that one will encounter their fair share of weird questions. As customer interactions typically range from normal to abusive to strange, ask any retail or food service worker and they’ll be quick to regale you with all of the bizarre questions they’ve heard while on the job.
One such question recently sparked discussion after it was posted to TikTok by user Jenna (@jennawallacegood).
In a video with over 40,000 views as of Saturday, Jenna claims that a customer voiced her concerns about the sodium content of an item. That item was salt.
@jennawallacegood #stitch with @allison <3 #fyp #salt #sodium #organic #retailworker ♬ original sound – Jenna Wallace-Good
“I used to work at this organic food grocery store, and everyone who shopped there was super obsessed with being healthy — unhealthily obsessed with eating healthy,” she recalls.
She describes an experience where a woman came to her cash register and set down a bag of salt. Before she paid, however, she paused to remark that she wanted to check how much sodium was in the salt.
“I go, ‘OK,’” Jenna says in the video. “She grabs the bag, looks at the bag, and she goes, ‘Oh my god, that’s so much sodium.’ In a bag of salt. Which is sodium.”
For context, table salt is a compound known as sodium chloride (NaCl). Understandably, something called “sodium chloride” has a substantial sodium content — specifically, around 40% of NaCl is composed of sodium.
In the comments section, some users tried to justify her question.
“To be fair there’s low sodium salt, but it doesn’t seem to be a case of ‘oops, grabbed the wrong item’ here,” a user shared.
However, a substantial part of the comments section consists of users sharing their own stories about questionable queries.
“I had a client once that wonder why they had to add chemicals into the water,” one user wrote. “There was H2O written on the bottle.”
“I got asked how many extra peanuts were in a jar of crunchy peanut butter,” another added.
“I used to work for a fast food MX restaurant and someone asked for a cheese crisp without cheese,” a third claimed.
“Working as a server I had someone ask me what the difference was between wings and boneless wings,” an additional commenter stated.
We’ve reached out to Jenna via Instagram direct message.
