St Paul Park Auto Parts

This place is a nightmare maze of old parts, old people, and old cars.
Rising from the ashes of an ancient car-​part burial ground, St Paul Park Auto Parts has long been the Mecca for the mechanic in the know. It’s a little hard to describe the experience of shopping here without making it sound terrible. Don’t expect to be greeted, don’t expect to be treated with any civility, don’t expect any help, and don’t expect anyone to go out of their way for you. Expect to get new parts for basically cost.
You can find it by driving down a dirt road, past the picked-​clean skeletons of rusted out cars ending in an old two story building surrounded by re-​purposed storage trucks filled with car parts both new and old. More on that in a moment…
Upon entering the front door, expect to stand in line for as long as it takes. Take this time to take a really good look around. Take in the green monochrome monitors they use for their ordering system. Enjoy the view into the past with the three phones they use for their separate phone lines. I particularly loved watching them guess which phone was ringing and almost never getting it right — and the phones ring constantly. They would be well served by hiring someone to just take phone calls.
Once you work your way to the front of the line, one of the three family members will ask you what part you ordered. In my case, they wrote down the part numbers of the muffler and resonator pipe I ordered and told me that one part was «either in the van around to the left of the front entrance or further around the corner in a plastic shed». The other part was «probably in the cargo truck around to the right». It took me a while to sort through all the parts, but I eventually found them all. I had to dig around in parts that look like they were scavenged from when it was a junk yard and I was pretty terrified that I was going to come across a nest of spiders or vipers or maybe some orcs, but I did it.
I got all the parts for less than half I would pay anywhere else and it was totally worth it. They can almost always get the parts on the same day as an added bonus. Just be prepared to get dirty and spend some time there. My trip took me a little over an hour from arrival to departure. Most of that was spent waiting in line to be given the number of the parts.
Give this place a shot when you are looking for an auto part.

Cheapest around. Organization isn’t there thing though. Might end up costing more time than it’s worth most of the time I have noticed. It’s the place I go if I’m not pressed for time. It helps if you call ahead, sometimes they don’t have it but they have a courier that makes two trips a day and unless they forget to order it it’s there same day.