The scissors paradox

A friend of mine recently tried to buy some scissors for the start of his university course, having none in the house at the time.

He soon found a pair in the local shop but very unhelpfully the scissors were fixed to the packaging with a plastic cable and, presumably as a safety measure, kept firmly shut.

As he pointed out to me, how are you supposed to open the packaging and get to your nice new scissors when they're firmly attached to the packaging and require a pair of scissors to be removed! Surely you're only buying scissors because you don't have any in the first place!

Thankfully for him the shop assistant was more than willing to lend him the store scissors before he went home so he could remove the packaging. The mind does boggle though.