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• The ‘Schengen shuffle’ allows non-EU citizens to stay in Europe for extended periods of time.
• Eric and Christina Schwendeman, both Americans, have made Italy their base since 2022.
• “It’s the best of both worlds for us,” Christina told Business Insider.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Eric and Christina Schwendeman, who left the US in 2022 to retire in Italy. The couple now does the “Schengen shuffle.” Schengen countries allow non-EU visitors to stay for up to 90 days within a 180-day period. The “Schengen shuffle” refers to the practice of non-EU travelers hopping between both Schengen and non-Schengen countries indefinitely. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Christina: We had gotten our elective residency visas, which allowed us to live in Italy full time. Those were valid for two years, so after that period was up, we decided for a variety of reasons that we wouldn’t renew them.

Eric: A lot of the motivation was that we’re traveling so much and we want to see so much of the world.

Christina: We started the Schengen shuffle in December 2024. There are 29 countries in the Schengen Agreement, which essentially are countries in Europe that allow free and open borders between them. So, if we want to drive from Italy to France, we don’t go through passport control.

We decided we wanted to do that instead of being full-time residents of Italy. Italy is one of the 29 countries in the Schengen area, so we said, “Okay, we can keep our house in Italy, stay there for 90 days, then go travel for 90 days, and come back.”

It’s the best of both worlds for us.

The Schwendemans have visited around 12 new countries this year

Eric: We’ve seen around 12 new countries this year, far and wide, from Southeast Asia to the Balkans.

We did Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. We went to Hong Kong and Macau. Then, we flew down to the Philippines for two weeks. We spent almost two weeks in India and then came home to Italy.

One of the things that we committed to was spending ample time in areas that allow us to see it, to experience it, and give ourselves days of rest in between, instead of just racing nonstop 24/7.

Christina: It allows you to become more a part of communities and — I think a lot of people use this phrase — more of a traveler than a tourist.

A great example for us is that we spent a month in Perast, Montenegro. It’s a very small town. By the time we left, we knew everyone. Like Eric said, we made friends that we’ve seen again since we left. We could go into any restaurant and know everybody by name. To be able to do that in a different community is just something really special.

Eric: I would say that 85% of the time we’re staying in Airbnbs.

Christina: If you get an Airbnb with your own kitchen, you can go grocery shopping and cook at home. That makes a big difference for us. If we’re staying anywhere longer than a week, it’s Airbnb because we want to feel like we have a base.

Transportation can get tricky, but we try not to fly a lot because it’s obviously the most expensive option. A lot of countries have phenomenal train systems, so we try to take advantage of those.

And packing is interesting. For 90 days at a time, we committed to each other that we would only each take one medium-sized suitcase.

Christina and Eric’s best tip for doing the Schengen shuffle: plan

Eric: Plan, plan, and plan some more when you think you’re done.

Christina: And then be ready to realize that something will inevitably go wrong with that plan. Flexibility is key. Travel is never without hiccups, so just be ready to roll with the punches.

It’s something you’ll remember for the rest of your life. We try never to think that anything that happens through this is ever bad. It’s just part of the adventure.

• Retailers across the US are gearing up for the peak sales event of the holiday shopping season.
• For Target, this means loading stores up with toys, electronics, apparel, and more.
• Target took Business Insider inside a warehouse where products are sorted and sent to regional stores.

Target really needs a win this holiday season.

The company has struggled in recent years with declining comparable sales, and it has cautious expectations for the all-important fourth quarter of this year.

One aspect of the business that incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke is keenly interested in improving is making sure products are actually available on shelves for shoppers to buy.

“If you’ve trusted us with a trip to the store, we can’t let you down by being out of stock, and we haven’t been good enough over the last several years on that front,” he said during a November earnings call.

Few days are more unforgiving of out-of-stocks than the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday has changed a lot in recent years, but it’s still the marquee sales event of the holiday shopping season.

That means stocking stores with the right quantities of toys, electronics, apparel, and other items.

The bullseye retailer invited Business Insider to take an exclusive look behind the curtain at one of its distribution centers, where merchandise from suppliers gets sorted and sent to individual stores across the region.

Target also fulfills more than 97% of its e-commerce orders from one of its retail stores, so that means almost everything the company sells online or offline must first pass through one of these distribution facilities.

Business Insider visited the warehouse a week before Thanksgiving and saw firsthand the overwhelming volume of items that go into ensuring each Target store has exactly what it needs each day.

Here’s how Target is gearing up for the holiday rush.

Target’s regional distribution center is located a half hour outside Milwaukee in the town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

The 1.5 million square foot facility serves 81 stores across four states: Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Senior site director Julie O’Clary started her career with Target as an intern at this facility and has worked at several locations over the years.

O’Clary says her facility typically processes about 600,000 cartons of merchandise in a normal week, but that number balloons to 800,000 a week during the holiday rush.

An additional 300,000 cartons also flow through the facility without active sorting, bringing the holiday volume to well north of a million cartons this week.

The sprawling warehouse could fit nearly 26 football fields and runs like a small city with more than 1,050 employees.

Trucks arrive from suppliers with inventory that must be unloaded and sorted. The warehouse handles roughly 45,000 different product codes.

A shipment of toys is unloaded from the truck onto conveyor belts and scanned with a laser rig.

Here’s where pallets of toys like these Cozy Coupe cars from the Little Tikes brand arrive.

The inbound loading docks are a ballet of people and forklifts in the days leading up to Black Friday.

“We see a lot of brown boxes here, but inside that brown box, there’s toys or cosmetics — something that our guests want, something that brings them joy — so that’s our job,” Clary said.

All around the facility, towers of best-selling Black Friday items can be seen — such as these flat-screen TVs.

The warehouse also gives a sneak peek into what could be the next viral toy, like these child-sized Target shopping carts.

Here, pallets of Mario Kart racing toys are stacked next to electric scooters and kid-sized four-wheelers.

Almost everything in the building needs a label, and these printers spool off barcodes nonstop.

The company also routinely tracks all problems — and potential problems — on whiteboards throughout the facility, which are updated hourly.

Though it’s not a store, some employees still wear Target’s classic red plaid shirts.

This facility is also where Target tailors inventory orders to give each individual store the exact number of items it needs.

For example, each box here is headed to a different store, and each contains different quantities of apparel in the right sizes and colors.

Items are then sent upstairs to a network of conveyor belts that guide each box to the correct truck.

Boxes pass by at high speed, and the system automatically slows down to allow items from multiple belts to merge into one.

As one of Target’s higher-volume distribution centers, the flow of goods continues around the clock.

Some shipments take a detour for extra labeling.

An elevated conveyor belt carries sorted merchandise to trucks waiting at the loading docks. Other big and bulky items are stored near the outbound docks for quicker access.

Boxes are automatically tipped onto rollers that feed right into a waiting truck.

The parade of boxes are then loaded into tractor-trailers like a life-size game of Tetris.

More evidence of the holidays is on display in the form of a pallet of Target-branded artificial Christmas trees on the loading docks.

O’Clary says the facility processes about 40 million outbound cartons a year. Some stores receive a truck every day, but during the holiday rush, they may take multiple deliveries a day.

O’Clary says her team is putting in thousands of hours of overtime this week to make sure Target customers have well-stocked shelves for their holiday shopping.

• OpenAI is working on a mysterious AI hardware device with famed iPhone designer Jony Ive.
• We don’t know what this device will be, but there are some other AI devices out there that could give us a clue.
• I’m having a hard time getting excited about buying this.

Trust me when I say that I am absolutely thrilled by the chance to blow some money on a new gadget. I really am. I love a gizmo, a device, a widget, or a doohickey. When I see some new electronic thingamabob that might make my life easier or more enjoyable, I want it.

And yet, I am really scratching my head about why I would want or need the new device that OpenAI is working on — whatever it is.

We don’t know much about this mysterious piece of hardware — not exactly what it will do, what it will look like, or what new things it’s capable of. Legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive is working on it, which is, of course, intriguing. Earlier this year, my colleague Alistair Barr rounded up a bunch of predictions about what the device might look like or do, and the ideas ranged from an iPod Shuffle-sized device to some sort of “companion” wearable.

In a recent interview with Laurene Powell Jobs, Sam Altman and Ive talked about the new device, giving away very little detail other than that they expect it to be ready in two years and they want it to pass a “lick” test (ew, but I get it).

But we still don’t really know what it will be. No one knows what might be more useful than your smartphone, which is kind of the most useful thing you can have!

The most boring scenario, which I fear sounds fairly likely, is that it’s some sort of audio device that uses ChatGPT, like a small speaker you can talk to as an assistant that listens and learns. (OpenAI did not respond to my request for comment or for more information on the device.)

We’ve seen some examples of devices like this. The AI Pin was a small clip-on wearable that could see and hear the world around you to give you AI-powered information. (An interesting example was holding up a fruit to it in the grocery store and asking it how much sugar it contained.) The AI Pin crashed and burned, plagued by bad reviews and buggy service. It was, perhaps, just ahead of its time.

I never tested it, but I had a mixed reaction when it launched: I have enormous hesistations about the idea that voice control is the way of the future — I just would be far too embarassed to talk out loud to a device in the grocery store, and I also know my coworkers would ring my neck if I were using it in our open office. And yet … I still kind of wanted it. It looked cool!

More recently, the Friend necklace, another wearable that listened to your conversations and would chat to you as a “friend” (???) had an ignoble launch. The startup bought a massive ad campaign in the New York City subway, and its posters were immediately vandalized by those who found the concept of an AI friend dystopian (whether the backlash was encouraged as part of some 4D chess master marketing plan, that’s something I simply don’t care to put too many brain cells into considering). The Friend necklace also suffered from bad reviews about its buggy service and unappealing concept.

There are also more low-key and less ambitious AI audio devices that perform straightforward tasks. The Plaud Note is a slim device that listens to your meeting or school lecture and takes notes. This is the kind of task AI is great for — making bullet-point summaries of a larger piece of text or audio. You can imagine how great this is for college students, or for people who have a lot of meetings and sales calls.

And yet, this really still doesn’t have a ton of appeal to me. As a journalist, recording and transcribing conversations is an important part of the job, and something that AI tools have helped immensely with (transcriptions especially). But that’s a small part of my day, and like people in many other professions, I also have conversations that I absolutely do not want recorded in any sense.

In my personal life, I’m just not sure I want this kind of speaker device. I already have an Alexa — which I do use! And enjoy! And yes, I wish “she” were smarter and better at doing tasks — but I can’t imagine expanding my use of a smart audio device that far past asking for reminders, the weather, or how many milliliters are in a cup. And though I look at my phone constantly, I can’t imagine vocally chatting with a device — that’s just a huge lifestyle change I can’t wrap my head around.

Maybe this device will do something far more exciting and amazing than just being a souped-up Siri that takes notes. Two years from now is a long time — perhaps some amazing new thing will happen that will totally blow our minds. Or maybe it’s just going to be a really nice version of a souped-up Siri. Which, I’m sad to say, just doesn’t really thrill me.

There’s too much unknown right now about this to pass any kind of judgment. But I’m pretty skeptical that this is going to be something that delights me. As a gadget lover, I am really hoping to have my mind changed.