Redundant choices in the drugstore

Since I have kids and it's cold and flu season, inevitably today I had to hike down to the local pharmacy to pick up some cold and flu medicine.

And inevitably I end up wondering what's the difference in what I get.

Two bottles of medicine, one for the cold and one for the flu. Both treat the same symptoms -- fever and sore throat, cough, stuffy nose, sneezing and runny nose.

"Surely," you say (at least if you were me), "the difference must be in the ingredients and/or the dosage."

Wrong again:

For those who can't read the text (blurry cell phone camera photos FTW!), the active ingredients for both medicines are as follows:

• Acetaminophen: 160mg
• Chlorpheniramine maleate: 1mg
• Dextromethorphan HBr: 5mg
• Phenylephrine HCl: 2.5mg

So now that we've established that both medicines are medically identical, what's the difference?

1. The flu medicine comes in an orange box, and the cold medicine comes in a purple box.
2. The flu medicine is bubble gum-flavored, and the cold medicine is grape-flavored.

Woo.

(To be fair, at least the prices are the same. Perhaps you'd expect that, but I was cynical enough to check...)

I suppose this makes sense to the accountants at the front office, but to a Joe Consumer like myself standing in the aisle, this makes as much sense as a rubber steak knife. The only logical reason I could think for having two products that are functionally identical from the same company is that it gives them an additional SKU to sit in the store -- hogging shelf space that would have otherwise gone to a competitor's product. Which, again, might make sense to the accountants, but strikes me as D-U-M.

I ended up buying the flu medicine, by the way, as my son likes bubble gum.

(But that still begs the question of why pink bubble gum-flavored medicine is packaged in an orange box...)