A note on specializations of Grothendieck polynomials

Buch and Rimányi proved a formula for a specialization of double Grothendieck polynomials based on the Yang–Baxter equation related to the degenerate Hecke algebra. A geometric proof was found by Yong and Woo by constructing a Gröbner basis for the Kazhdan–Lusztig ideals. In this note, we give an elementary proof for this formula by using only divided difference operators.