• Brandt, Richard L. (2011). One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com. New York: Portfolio Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59184-375-7.
• Daisey, Mike (2002). 21 Dog Years. Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-2580-5.
• Friedman, Mara (2004). Amazon.com for Dummies. Wiley Publishing. ISBN 0-7645-5840-4.
• Marcus, James (2004). Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. W. W. Norton. ISBN 1-56584-870-5.
• Spector, Robert (2000). Amazon.com – Get Big Fast: Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the World. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-662041-4.
• Stone, Brad (2013). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little Brown and Co. ISBN 9780316219266. OCLC 856249407.

• Companies in the NASDAQ-100 Index
• Amazon.com
• Arts and crafts retailers
• 1994 establishments in Washington (state)
• American brands
• American websites
• Book selling websites
• Bookstores of the United States
• Cloud computing providers
• Commerce websites
• Companies based in Seattle, Washington
• Companies established in 1994
• Companies listed on NASDAQ
• Companies based in Washington (state)
• E-book suppliers
• Internet companies of the United States
• Internet properties established in 1994
• Multinational companies headquartered in the United States
• Online companies
• Online music stores
• Online retail companies of the United States
• Review websites
• Self-publishing companies
• Software companies based in Washington (state)
• Mobile phone manufacturers
• Webby Award winners

Logo used since 1993
Agency overview
Formed	July 1, 1971; 44 years ago Washington, D.C.[1]
Type	Independent
Headquarters	475 L'Enfant Plaza SW Washington, D.C. 20260-0004
Employees	617,254 (486,822 career, 130,432 non-career) as of February 17, 2015[2]
Agency executives	Megan Brennan, Postmaster General Ronald A. Stroman, Deputy Postmaster General
Key document	Postal Clause of the United States Constitution
Website	www.USPS.com

The full eagle logo, used in various versions from 1970 to 1993

The United States Postal Service, also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, orPostal Service, often abbreviated as USPS, is an independent agency of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agenciesexplicitly authorized by the United States Constitution.

The U.S. Mail traces its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress, whereBenjamin Franklin was appointed the firstpostmaster general. The Post Office Department was created in 1792 from Franklin's operation, elevated to a cabinet-level department in 1872, and transformed in 1971 into the U.S. Postal Service as an independent agency under the Postal Reorganization Act.

The USPS employed 617,254 workers (as of February 2015) and operated 211,264 vehicles in 2014. The USPS is the operator of the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world.[2] The USPS is legally obligated to serve all Americans, regardless of geography, at uniform price and quality. The USPS has exclusive access toletter boxes marked "U.S. Mail" and personal letterboxes in the United States, but still competes against privatepackage delivery services, such as UPS and has part use with FedEx Express.[3]

The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters.[4]Since the 2006 all-time peak mail volume,[5] after which Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act,[6] (which mandated $5.5 billion per year to be paid into an account to fully prefund employee retirement health benefits, a requirement exceeding that of other government and private organizations [7]), revenue dropped sharply due to recession-influenced[8] declining mail volume,[9] prompting the postal service to look to other sources of revenue while cutting costs to reduce its budget deficit.[10] The USPS lost US$5.5 billion in fiscal 2014, and its revenue was US$67.8 billion.[11]