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They use the same language as us, they watch the same TV as us, they use the same software as us, so why on earth are US citizens paying up to 50 per cent less for their computer kit than we are?

Let's be concrete about this. A copy of Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite costs £538 from Adobe.co.uk and £323 ($599) from Adobe.com. Microsoft Office 2003 Professional costs you £371 and an American £211 ($420). A digital camera costs 40 per cent more in York than it does in New York.

Some manufacturers fob us off with stories of localisation costs. Well, it is true, searching all the code for 'Color' and replacing it with 'Colour' is indeed an arduous task. There must be a team of hundreds in every major software company dedicated to the task, so they are quite right: Britons must pay that extra £150 per copy to cope with the drain on resources. How could we possibly argue?

Another well-trodden excuse is the dollar-pound exchange rate. It is just that we are in an unusually buoyant period at the moment, they say, patting our heads reassuringly; it is not that they are keeping the prices high so that they get more revenue, it is because they are protecting us from a sudden fluctuation in the exchange rate.

Well, as we point out in our Rip-off Britain feature this month, for

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the exchange rate to drop from its current $1.85 to the $1.11 necessary to justify the cost of Creative Suite 2, we would all be rather more concerned about what was happening to the British economy than we would be about the cost of software.

I'm willing to treat the 'price of marketing' argument with a little more sympathy. Yes, it does cost money to maintain a UK website, to pay UK marketing people, to advertise in the UK. And yes, there are sheer economies of scale that count in the US's favour: they have 290 million people to sell to, compared to the UK's mere 60 million.

But as part of our investigation, we spoke to dabs.com - a company that trades in both the US and the UK, so it has an unrivalled insight into the way the two markets work. 'The manufacturers have decided that the UK is a treasure island,' our insider explained. 'Car manufacturers have done it for years, and only recently started to sort it out.'

One thing is clear. Where the car industry has led, the computer industry has to follow. The price discrepancies between the US and UK are too big to justify, especially now that web-savvy consumers - companies as well as individuals - can so quickly check the price of a product on Amazon.com before they buy from Amazon.co.uk.

We do not need to sit idly by either: we can shop smarter. If we all start to exploit the loopholes that already exist and cut the UK revenue of those big companies, they will notice.

That's why a huge part of our Rip-off Britain feature is dedicated to explaining how to save real money by shopping online in the US. There are pitfalls, and sometimes it simply does not make sense to buy from America, but even if you buy only one out of every three products from abroad then you will still make a huge saving every year. And every time you do, we will move a step closer to fairer prices for the whole of the UK.