I've driven past that red-and-white building on Minnesota Avenue a hundred times — the one with "Mr. Bendo" painted on the side in letters you can read from two blocks away — and never thought much about what it meant to have a shop that actually fixes the loud, grinding, worrying sounds your car makes instead of just diagnosing them and sending you somewhere else.
Automotive Brake & Exhaust sits just south of 26th Street in a part of town where businesses still have hand-painted signs and phone numbers people remember. I stopped in last month because my Subaru sounded like it was dragging a shopping cart, and the guy at the counter didn't try to upsell me on anything — he just said they'd take a look and call me in an hour. They did. It was a heat shield. Twenty-three dollars.
The waiting area smells like coffee and old magazines, which somehow feels right for a place that's been here long enough to have 247 Google reviews and still answer their own phone. There's a vending machine that takes dollar bills, a TV that's usually on the news, and a window where you can watch them work if you're the kind of person who needs to see that your car is actually being touched.
The honest truth is they're not open on weekends, which means if something goes wrong on a Friday night, you're waiting until Monday — and in Sioux Falls, where half of us are hauling kids to hockey practice or driving to Tea for groceries, that can feel like forever.
But they know brakes. They know exhaust. They know the difference between a noise that's annoying and a noise that's dangerous — and they'll tell you which one you've got without making you feel like an idiot for asking.
— Grace