Some mistakes are easy to make: confusing sugar with salt, for example.

But Twitter users were left amused and baffled when a shopper revealed a fellow customer had mistaken cubes of butternut squash for cheese.

Sports journalist James Dator, of Greenville, North Carolina, live-tweeted as the anonymous customer demanded that the grocery store refund his money for the hapless purchase yesterday. A hilarious exchange between him and the beleaguered supermarket staff then ensued.

The thread quickly went viral online, and each tweet has been liked thousands of times.

From far away, you might be able to see why butternut squash cubes (pictured) could be mistaken for cubes of cheese. But up close, the texture is very different

James Dator started tweeting the story of the frustrated and very confused shopper yesterday

It began when James was shopping for some essentials for dinner, when he overhead another customer's conversation with staff.

He tweeted: 'A very confused man is attempting to return his open diced butternut squash because he thought it was a giant box of cubed cheese.'

As a vegetable, butternut squash has a very different texture to cubes of cheese so it is not known how the shopper managed to confuse the two items.

But the baffling incident only got stranger and even more hilarious.

Twitter users were gripped by the saga that James Dator was live-tweeting yesterday

James, who writes for sports website SB Nation, soon began live-tweeting the entire exchange between this confused customer and the eager-to-please supermarket staff.

The staff of course at first refused to refund the shopper for the mistaken purchase because he has opened the packet.

James tweeted: 'I can't believe this. They're saying he can't because it's open. He's saying it wasn't clearly labeled.

'There's a GIANT label that says butternut squash.'

Incredibly, and surely only to make their lives easier, the grocery store staff agreed to refund the customer's money.

But the angry shopper wasn't finished.

The incident ended with the man leaving the shop without any cheese at all - but with another butternut squash

James tweeted: 'Now he's demanding they honor two pounds of cubed cheese for $2.97 as if it was priced like squash.'

When the staff informed him that the supermarket didn't sell two pound bags of cubed cheese, the frustrated shopper just exclaimed 'I have guests waiting!' before demanding the store slice him two pounds of cheese from the deli counter - for the same price of the packet of squash he had originally bought.

The story took an even stranger and hilarious turn when another staff member intervened.

James tweeted: 'Oh god an employee trying to be helpful half heard the conversation and retrieved a whole butternut squash and it's a lot worse now.'

Twitter users were amused and baffled by the story - and for many, it brought back similar memories from working in retail

The customer allegedly shouted 'I DON'T WANT RABBIT FOOD I JUST NEED SOME GOTDANG CHEESE!!!'.

In the end, the shopper bizarrely left the store without any cheese - but took the whole butternut squash with him.

Twitter was gripped by the saga, and it prompted several people to recall equally bizarre incidents they had witnessed or experienced first-hand while working in retail.

James tweeted in response to the reaction he'd received to the cheese story, and said: 'Really happy so many of y'all enjoyed cheese man. I'm also so horrified from the retail stories y'all have sent me. You're the real heroes.'