No, no, Dotty, only the drunk tourists in the French Quarter flash for beads. Cultural lesson now for everybody:
Mardi Gras is, first and foremost, a family festival. That’s right, it’s something you do with your children. When you hear of drunken women flashing their boobies for beads, that is not what the vast majority of locals do.
The various organizations, krewes, that parade for Mardi Gras have parades scheduled for 3 weeks prior to Mardi Gras. (There are some old krewes that you have to be born into that wouldn’t parade if their lives depended on it; they have fancy, ultra-exclusive balls and tableaus.) The parade routes run for miles, and only the last 1/4 mile or so even runs anywhere near the French Quarter. Each float in each parade is loaded with riders, each of whom has several hundred pounds of beads to throw out to the crowds that line the route; and when you consider that parades have 10-30 floats, and on the weekends there are as many as 4-5 parades in a row that run from 10 am till midnight or so, you can imagine the hundreds of thousands of beads that are thrown out. Families or groups stake out spots on the parade routes – we joined a group every year that we just ran into by accident our second year there – and would bring out food and chairs and drinks (but everyone’s so happy, even if they get drunk they’re not obnoxious out on the parade routes) and make a great big party of it.
Except inside the quarter, flashing boobies for beads is actually illegal and you can get arrested for it. That’s because there are so many children there. In fact, “parade ladders” are specially made for small children – take a six-foot stepladder, attach a box-like seat on top with bar to hold the kids in, and put your toddler(s) in the seats. Then the parent stands on the ladder behind the toddler and catches what the kids miss, and since the best stuff (toys, etc.) is thrown for kids to try to catch, standing just downthrow of a child’s ladder is often a good place to clean up. 
The standing joke is that the first words a New Orleans child learns to say are not “Mama” or “Dada,” but “long beads!” 
Our house was one street away from one of the Westbank parade routes, where several Westbank krewes held several weekend daytime/evening parades early in the parade season. The riders’ beads are all packaged in gallon-sized bags (or smaller) of a few dozen, with groups of strands small enough not to get too tangled fastened with a paper strip held by a single paper clip, and then the beads are packed in special bead bags – plastic tote bags with zipper tops that are surprisingly sturdy and can hold up to 8-10 gallon-sized bags of beads, depending on the size of the beads (they come in widely varying sizes and degrees of fanciness). And near the end of the parade route, riders would often find themselves with a lot of extra beads – so instead of throwing them by the single strand or handful of strands, they’d throw the bag the beads were packed in. I have caught bags of beads that weighed enough that they nearly knocked me over. And the evening parades would be COLD, too, so imagine getting hit in the hands or the face by ice-cold beads! Brrr and OUCH!
And, of course, if you have a friend riding in a parade, you write their name on a sign (because they can’t hear a thing with the crowd yelling) and hold it up and run over to the float, and they bury you with beads. Papa Tigs had an entire float filled with his coworkers in one of the biggest krewes (Endymion), and they dumped so many beads on him he could hardly carry them! You could really clean up with friends in parades. It was fun.
We would collect up to 4-5 tote bags full of beads at some parades, and then we’d bring them home, sort them out, and package them for rethrowing (beads get recycled almost endlessly). We figured one or both of us would be riding in a parade at some point when we could collect the $$ (you pay anywhere from $500 to several thousand bucks to join a krewe, plus you have to buy the beads; it’s not cheap!), and then we’d have the vast majority of beads already instead of having to buy anything but the special krewe beads.
But then Papa Tigs got laid off, and so when it came time to move, we found a bead reseller who’d buy our long beads off of us and sold him 14 bags of the long beads; our poor car was nearly scraping the ground hauling all those beads up to his shop! But we got something like $120 for them. 
And then I was going to freecycle, i.e. give away, all but a few bags of the most special beads – except the guys who were loading our truck packed them in the truck, inaccessibly, before we realized that they’d packed the freecycle pile.
So we ended up with about 35 bags of Mardi Gras beads. In Maryland. You figure anywhere from 10 gross of the 33", cheapie beads to 2-3 gross of the longest, fanciest beads per bead bag; we probably had close to 50,000 strands of beads sitting in our storage shed when we first got here. We try to give them away, but people up here don’t appreciate beads in New Orleans-sized quantity!
And thus endeth the Mardi Gras bead-collecting lesson.
