Since August 5th is my unofficial pi times e day (see my previous post), I decided to pie myself silly yesterday. To accomplish this, I had to let my supplies sit in the trunk of my car for 6 hours. I normally go to Walmart to purchase 4 big tubs of GV whipped topping. However, WM only had 5 little tubs. I bought 4 of those and 2 big tubs of Cool whip. When it came time to make the pies, the Cool Whip was somewhat degraded, whereas the GV whipped topping was OK. Has anybody else noticed that Cool Whip seems to degrade faster than GV whipped topping?

Yes, they are different! The Great Value brand has partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (read: Crisco/shortening) as its primary thickener, so it does not really melt and has excellent sticking properties. I just finished my annual large-scale session using an exorbitant amount of Great Value topping (40 tubs worth; about all my fridge can hold!) and I did notice that in my area's Walmarts, the smaller 8 oz tubs (label largely white in color) are now being made with the inferior Cool Whip formula. The larger 16 oz tubs (blue label) are still using the good formula, for now...

Cool Whip's primary thickener is the much more liquid corn syrup, so it does not hold together very well in its natural state and is much more susceptible to losing its form. If I see any brand of whipped topping where the primary non-water ingredient is corn syrup, I won't buy it personally...

Thanks for the info. I never looked at the ingredients. Great Value products are so much cheaper, I never thought to look. I wonder if it might be an idea to buy and store Crisco (or the GV equivalent) and then mix it with milk at the appropriate time. I think that I will look into it.