"sure thing" vs "you're welcome"

[darkoshi]

A co-worker thanked me for something small while we were Skyping. When You're welcome feels awkward or too formal, sometimes I reply No problem. This time I typed Sure.

But then the word on the screen looked odd to me, and I wondered if that wasn't a well-known response after all. Maybe it looked odd to the other person too.

I'm of the impression that using Sure in this way is short for Sure thing to imply it's a sure thing, ie. a certainty, that one is always willing to help out like that, and it's no big deal.

But when I checked a few dictionaries, neither the definitions for "sure" nor "sure thing" mention it being used in this way.

So I looked up "saying sure instead of you're welcome". These pages mention saying "sure":

30+ Things You Can Say Instead of ‘You’re Welcome’ - this is quite a good list.

10 Ways to Say “You’re Welcome”

This page confirms my belief that "Sure thing" is also used:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30554/can-sure-thing-mean-youre-welcome


Yes, this is why "you're welcome" feels awkward to me sometimes:

Why Don’t We Say ‘You’re Welcome’ Anymore?

If you’ve done something for someone and you say ‘you’re welcome’ after they thank you, the implication is kind of, ‘Yeah, I really did you a favor and you should be grateful,” she said. “So ‘certainly’ or ‘of course’ means you’re kind of belittling what you just did, which is more courteous.”

Comments

[conuly]

Yes, this is why "you're welcome" feels awkward to me sometimes:

Why Don’t We Say ‘You’re Welcome’ Anymore?

All that talk, and they don't seem to mention the way "you're welcome" effectively displaced "my pleasure" in the 20th century. But then, I did skim....

[darkoshi]

It did mention this:
The use of “you’re welcome” as a response to “thank you” actually doesn’t date as far back as one might think. Its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary as a response to “thank you” comes from 1907 (though people apparently used “welcome” on its own in this sense as far back as the early 1600s).

This: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/07/welcoming-committee.html
mentions: [Update, Oct. 4, 2016: A reader found an earlier citation in The House by the Churchyard, an 1863 novel by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu: “ ‘I thank ye again, sir.’ ‘You’re welcome, my honey,’ rejoined Toole, affectionately.”]