Consider this a very preliminary answer -- and one that only describes the terrain of the ballpark where I suspect the question you're asking lands. If anything, consider this an invitation to take what you've noticed in the archives and plug it in to the existing literature on the period.

As a start, it's worth noting that Americans became increasingly attached to their identities as consumers over the course of the 20th century. Most of us are probably familiar with the story of the Industrial Revolution(s) and the transition away from the 'independence' of frontier life or the self-sufficient family farms of the Jeffersonian model. But on top of being a story about changes in material production, this also necessitated a series of cultural and political changes in American life.

This is perhaps most visible in the contemporary environment if you recognize the way we attach identities to specific brands and goods (e.g. the "PC master race"), but you can also think of it as a broad transformation in how we conceive of the role of consumption and its (fluctuating and uncertain) role linking private purchases to public life or civic goods. Consider, for example, the notions behind consumer boycotts from the Civil Rights Era all the way to modern 'cancel culture,' wherein individual consumer choices get cast as political activity. While you can find traces of this in earlier eras (e.g. colonial boycotts of tea and other goods), this took on a new salience in the 20th century, as American life became less-and-less defined by what you made and in favor of what you bought.

To speak with a little more concrete historical grounding, consumer activism (particularly boycotts) were a major feature of political life in the Great Depression. Local communities would frequently organize against what they perceived as unfair price hikes or inferior quality goods (particularly meat and other food). Given the gender dynamics of the era, these movements were often led by women, who were most typically in charge of household purchasing. Moving into World War II, consumer activism shifted to focus on supporting the war effort via consumption, as local groups organized to ensure that merchants were observing rationing and price regulations.

I'll return to consumer identity/activism in the postwar period you're asking about in just a moment, after a quick segue to note a parallel shift happening alongside these developments: the collapse of political support for classical laissez-faire economics in favor of a Keynesian model from the Great Depression forward. From FDR's New Deal all the way through at least the Great Society of the 1960s, there was widespread consensus among both voters and political leaders that the government ought to play a strong role in shaping the American economy, including in making sure that basic goods and services are affordable for the average family. It was, in short, Congress' job in the eyes of their constituents to make sure that an ordinary family could keep meat on the table. (Arguably we are still very much living in the Keynesian era, even if particular mechanisms like price/wage caps or rationing have become anathema, but that is a topic for another day.)

These two phenomenon converged in the postwar period. The federal government viewed stimulating consumption (via the GI bill, subsidized home loans, etc.) as the central plank of its economic planning, while cultural/social attitudes increasingly came to view consumption not just as a means to luxury or comfort, but as a civic duty in-and-of-itself. Consider this excerpt from a LIFE magazine story (P. 32, if google will let you access) in 1947 as a prime example:

Ted Hemeke, his wife Jeanne and three children comprise just the family, perhaps minus a "statistical" child, that the Twentieth Century Fund economists had in mind when projecting their complicated charts of what life should be like in the US by 1960. For in a war--wrecked world the US looks good, but only by comparison. It must improve a great deal. The economists found that many millions of US families live far more meanly than is good for them or for the country.... [The modern house] has all the modern features which people like Ted and Jeanne should be able to buy in order to provide full employment and improved living standards for the rest of the nation.”

Here we can see that consumption isn't just something one does for one's own benefit, but rather as (in part) an obligation to your countrymen, to keep the assembly lines and paychecks running.

So, what does any of this have to do with your question about the day-to-day reporting on commodity prices? Well, broadly I would suggest that in this environment, commodity prices were a matter of utmost civic concern -- i.e. exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to find a great deal of coverage of in your daily newspaper. This doesn't exactly answer why they would receive less coverage by the time of your own youth -- I might briefly suggest that we should probably consider a similar range of cultural and political changes, while vaguely gesturing at the neoliberal turn of the Reagan era to consider the emergence of a competing set of ideas/values around consumption and civic responsibility, but this would require quite a bit more unpacking.

For further reading, I strongly recommend A Consumers' Republic by Lizabeth Cohen. In addition to painting a much more complete picture than the brief sketch I've offered above, Cohen also provides a pretty rich history of midcentury New Jersey suburbs, which may be relevant to whatever other research you're doing on urban/suburban New York. =)