Is car shopping getting a little better?

My wife and I went to look at a car to replace the SUV we are giving back at lease end. Of course Buick would not negotiate the contract lease to buy price we signed when we leased the car 3 years ago. The finance company takes over and dealer has nothing to do with it. So it is somehow less expensive to go out and buy the exact same car with the same mileage (if we were so inclined) from somebody else. This makes no sense to me at all.

So we went to Toyota and then to Nissan. The Toyota folks were nice but the dealer was crawling with prospective buyers. We could not even get a sales person for 15 minutes! But we were allowed to walk the lot and survey what they has which is what we really wanted to do anyway. But there was no problem there with potential customers! And it was a nice summer August Saturday. At Nissan they were also busy and did not have a sales person available (ok this was strange and 180 degrees from what we thought would happen - I was thinking ghost town and tumbleweeds and things like that on the lot with nobody there). Anyway they also allowed us to walk around and we found something we were mildly interested in and they popped right out with keys, and a non-pushy salesperson and we went for a quick test drive.

All in all it was not what we expected and maybe it was the sales people in particular but both experiences were pretty good and both allowed us to manage the situation to our liking. They did not ask for our contact information as at that point we were not serious buyers but they did give their information for us to call when WE wanted. And yes we will go back because of that!