Turbo Tax.  The plumber or shop assistant is your tax preparer.  Whoops!  Apparently, these ads hit home with their target.  When I first saw them, before the brouhaha, I was feeling bad for part time tax preparers too.  As far as I know, most of them are well trained and have the resources necessary to do a good job.  Most people's taxes aren't that hard.  What a tax preparer is there to do, in my own opinion, is help you fill out the forms correctly.  They're not accountants.  If you have more than these are my wages, these are my accounts, these are my dependents, you need more than the corner tax shop.

Crank:  All of these companies make it sound like they're doing you a favor by doing your taxes for free, but the fact is that's brought to you by the IRS.  The government wants your taxes filled out electronically (saves us a lot of money to let computers handle digits rather than people handling paper), and they also want them filled out correctly, so there's no long series of redos that costs thousands of dollars for $500 difference.  So they make the standard tax prep available free to you at these tax prep firms.

Kudos:  The Turbo Tax ads are clever.  They use character actors who are recognizable to anyone like me who watches too much TV, but whose names we don't know.  I'm sure paying these actors for a national campaign must have cost significantly more than scale, but it was worth it.  Seeing the plumber or shop assistant, the viewer gets that tickle of recognition right along with the surprised client in the story.  Very well done.

The whole need to differentiate who gets to do your taxes for "free" by which slight difference in their offerings is being fought by all these firms.  The target of these ads is doing it too.  And I think their reply ads touting the qualifications of individual preparers are cute too.  If they would all just stop making it sound like they're doing you a favor by giving you free filing when Free File is a joint program with the IRS that they all belong to, I'd be much less cranky about it. (Here's a nice table that summarizes the programs and requirements.)